Config 2020 Recap. Designing with real data.
This issue continues Config recap as more participants shared their thoughts about the conference, and Figma itself published recordings of all talks. One of the most discussed topics in the community is designing with real data, and thanks to plugins there are plenty of ways to fill mockups with content from the APIs. Speaking of plugins, a few collections were published in the last weeks where everyone can find something useful. And don’t miss the discussions on Twitter and a fun chart showing the popularity of product design tools over time. Enjoy the issue!
— Eugene
Config 2020 Recap. Part 2.
Reflections on Config, Our First User Conference
Dylan Field, CEO of Figma, reflects on the conference, Figma community, open design, and some key themes that emerged from a collective discussion.
Videos of All Config Talks
Playlist with recordings of all 23 talks.
Config 2020. Figma’s First User Conference in San Francisco
Elsma Ramirez from SoFi shares her notes from the conference and highlights talks and speakers that inspired her the most. Her favorites: “Welcome to a new decade of design” by Dylan Field, “The city guide to open source” by Devon Zuegel from GitHub, and “Design System Showcase”.
What I Learned Attending Awwwards, Design Matters, and Figma Config
One young designer, three amazing conferences. Great writeup by Michelle Chiu from MongoDB.
Four Takeaways About Modern Design From Figma’s Config Conference
In this short video, two Principal Analysts from Forrester Research discuss their takeaways and impressions from the conference.
Designing With Real Data
How to Design With Real Content in Figma
The tutorial explains the concept of content-first design and shows how to connect real content to elements in Figma files.
Populating Figma With Product Information From GraphQL
On a similar note, this post demonstrates how to get data to Figma from product information system (PIM) Crystallize using GraphQL Data Fill plugin. (The plugin is universal and can be used with other GraphQL services as well.)
JSON to Figma Plugin. How to Create a Vanilla Figma Plugin
If one of the existing plugins won’t do it, Pavel Laptev explains how to build a plugin from scratch for populating layers with data from JSON files.
Michael McMillan: Figma’s Underrated Killer Feature Is Their REST API
Truly mind-blowing how this company uses Figma as a CMS for their website through API.
Brian Lovin: Open-Sourced a Plugin to Fetch and Populate Data From GitHub
“The published plugin is private to our org, but hopefully the implementation is useful for anyone trying to build something similar.”
Collections of Plugins
Using Figma Plugins to Quickly Generate a Color System
How to speed up a tedious process of setting up a basic color system in Figma using plugins Smart Text and Chroma Color.
Figma Plugins (2020 Essentials)
Solid collection grouped into categories like accessibility, collaboration, productivity, development, animation, and optimization.
Top 16 Underrated Figma Plugins to Boost Design Systems Development
Plugins to accelerate managing, ordering, and labeling design system components. The recommendations are pretty good, but I don’t think it’s fair to call some of these plugins with thousands of installations “underrated”.
Videos
Thomas Lowry: Embracing the Chaos
Thomas Lowry (Designer Advocate, Figma) on what happens when you open the entire design process to the greater cross-functional team, what he’s learned from talking to hundreds of design teams, and shares some of his own experiences of working on Figma at Figma.
Animating Microinteractions With Figma
Build and animate a prototype for a simple micro-interaction in Figma in this tutorial by Jeremy Osborn, Academic Director at Aquent Gymnasium.
Tweets
Guillaume Hubert: 10 years of Product Design tools
A chart showing the popularity of product design tools over time, based on a number of followers on Twitter. It’s fascinating to see how some products experience exploding growth and #designtwitter favorites are changing all the time.
Tekeste Kidanu: Spell-checker plugin made more than $1,000
Congratulations to the author! Great to see that some developers are able to monetize the results of their work.
Josh Hemsley: Looking for new ways to structure Figma files / projects
Lots of ideas on structuring Figma files and projects in replies to this tweet.
Jordan Singer: Natural language processing + Figma
An experimental plugin that lets you talk to Figma and design by providing instructions. Fun!
Brie Wolfson: Something clicked about what is so special about Figma
Great thread and perspective from one of Figma employees.
Rogie: What was your first Figma crush?
Lovely responses from everyone. So many things to love in Figma!
Plugins
LottieFiles
The plugin provides access to the library of Lottie animations and interactive designs.
Viewports
Browse the most popular display sizes and apply them to frames.
Chart
Use real or random data to create the most popular charts. Chart supports copy-paste from editors like Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets, live connection with Google Sheets and remote JSON (REST API), local CSV and JSON files.
Resources
Figma Today
“Think of it as the Chatroulette of design reviews.“ Random community project every time you reload the page.
Moodboard Kit
A collection of Moodboard layouts from Mixpanel, and accompanying slides that make presenting design concepts easy.
Component Sprite World Map Generator
Make the world map out of custom shapes.
Slide Guides
Slide Guides is a collection of grid styles for 16:9 widescreen slides. They’re perfect for jumpstarting a presentation in Figma or for exporting to use in Keynote or Google Slides.
From the Headquarters
Today We’re Introducing a New Prototype Sharing Permission
Sharing prototypes without giving access to their design files was released after being announced at Config.
Figma Is Voted #1 Mid-Stage Company in the Enterprise Tech 30 List
The Enterprise Tech 30 is an exclusive list of the most promising private companies in enterprise tech, as determined by the number of votes from the prominent venture capitalists.