Flexbox. Cool thing. “Shining a light.”
Hi there! 👋 I’ve been catching up on the past episodes of the Design Details podcast and noticed that the “cool things” that hosts share every episode is one of my favorite segments. Figured I’ll borrow the idea and start sharing some of my favorite tools and resources not related to Figma at the end of issues as well. Let me know if you find them interesting!
— Eugene
Sponsor
Don’t stress about organizing or explaining your design files
With Zeplin you can quickly organize your design file into consumable bites. Name sections, add descriptions and share simple links to your designs.
What’s New
Figma is using dark patterns to charge you more
I’m not a fan of the clickbaity title and tone of this post, but something needs to be done about the unexpected charges. Just last week I got charged for an extra seat after moving a file from Drafts to a project (or at least that’s what I think happened). My work account also accumulated several unintended editors over the last year. Sharing an editable link is an easy mistake to make and leads to completely unexpected charges.
Using Figma
The ultimate guide to breakpoints and flexbox in Figma
Chuck Rice explains his Flexbox imitation technique combining the approach from the Breakpoints plugin with the updated Auto Layout. Pretty cool if you need to imitate the flex-wrap CSS property.
A complete guide to Figma component properties
Edward Chechique wrote a detailed and well-illustrated guide to component properties.
Five best practices for component props
Ridd shares five awesome strategies for using component properties: strategic nesting, progressive disclosure, minimizing decisions, emojis, and streamlining the instance swap.
How to create the animated “iPad mini” text with Lottie and After Effects
The team at LottieFiles explains how to recreate an animation from Apple’s iPad mini website.
Plugins
Generater Beta
I’ve shared a video preview of this generative art plugin in Issue #70, and now it’s available in a public beta. I played with Generater for a little bit and it was a lot of fun! Looking forward to using it on one of the projects.
illlustrations
A new plugin with 120+ high-quality free illustrations by Vijay Verma.
Backstage
“Sketch shined a light on UX design”
I’m not a big fan of Sketch’s “Sketch vs Figma” page, but I had a big laugh over this. Highly resourceful.
Cool Thing
Craft – The Future of Documents
My first cool thing is a gorgeous editor and knowledge base for Mac and iOS. If you’re familiar with Notion, you’ll feel right at home. I use Craft to prepare Figmalion issues, take notes during meetings, plan family trips, and save and organize highlights from my reading. It’s a native app, so saving things by dragging or using a sharing extension is effortless on all platforms.