Design advent. Performance cards. Ten mistakes.
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How to optimize your design-to-development workflow
A key aspect of building designs is giving developers exactly what they need. See how Zeplin makes design handoff a seamless part of the development process.
App Updates
Updates to plugin and widget publishing
Improvements to publishing, managing, and promoting plugins and widgets — now multiple people can publish updates and a playground file can be added to provide more context on when and how to use a resource. For more details, see the Twitter thread by Figma PM Bersabel Tadesse.
Updates to team controls and permissions
A few changes to team controls and permissions on Enterprise and Organization plans.
What’s New
24 Days of Design Gifts
Framer and Fons Mans teamed up to create an advent calendar of design gifts, from heavily discounted apps to free icon & wallpaper packs. So far they’ve offered big discounts on Sketch and Campsite subscriptions, as well as a free typeface from The Pangram Pangram Foundry.
Performance Cards: Designing with Meaning and Empathy
New article and Figma resources from Spotify Design: “If we only design for speedy devices, we also risk finding out late in the development process that our feature performs poorly on devices used in emerging markets — and at this point, it can be costly and painful to make significant changes. When designing for a global audience, we have to do better, which is why we developed Performance Context Cards and Performance Action Cards: tools for our teams (and yours) to use during certain stages of the product design process.”
Figma Schema, London 2022: My Highlights
Matt Bailey attended Schema 2022 conference in London and shared his impressions. All of the talks are already available on YouTube, so check out Matt’s summaries to see if something piques your interest.
Using Figma
Top 10 Figma mistakes when building the design system
Molly Hellmuth shares common mistakes that many of her students make when building their first design system, from overusing component sets and styles to mismanaging icons and making every component public.
Best advanced Figma tips for setting up a design system
Dann Petty asks for the best Figma tips for setting up a design system, and there are lots of golden nuggets in the replies. One of my favorites is “to not over eagerly start the design system when you start a project”.
Prototyping in Figma on Twitch
Ana and Miggie are back streaming their experiments with Figma prototypes. This time they cover drag interactions and video among other things.
Create a hamburger menu transition in Figma
A short video showing how to create a hamburger menu transition in Figma.
Resources
Celebrate the holidays with Figma
Figma prepared a collection of templates and fun team activities to celebrate the holidays.
Gingerbread house builder in FigJam
Great team activity from Miggie — build a gingerbread house using the provided virtual gingerbread cookies and sweets. In the end, you can even make your own card.
Flowbite Design System
The folks at Flowbite open-sourced their collection of Figma components based on the Flowbite Design System featuring variants, Auto Layout, dark mode, examples, style guide, and seamless integration with Tailwind CSS.
File Thumbnail Kit for Figma
Joey Banks published an update to his file thumbnail UI kit with dozens of custom combinations, and now even easier to edit with component properties.
Figma Thumbnails Template
In addition to Joey’s thumbnail kit, check out this template from the design team at Doist. It’s specific to their products, but can be easily customized or used as an inspiration.