7 lessons. Organization. Gooey blobs. AI plugins.
Sponsor
Big design takeaways from 2022
Join us at Harmony to learn from product, design, and dev leaders at Rocket Companies, Veeva, and Chipotle. They will talk about their experience in design systems, collaboration, automation, and scaling product teams.
App Updates
Comments Batching and Rich Text Support
Comments now support rich text (bolding, italicizing, strikethroughs, links, and lists), and notifications are batched for all comment threads you’re not actively involved in.
Analyze engagement with Mixpanel
The new integration lets you embed a Mixpanel preview in FigJam to bring data into your whiteboarding sessions. File previews are automatically synced with Mixpanel so the latest data changes in Mixpanel will be reflected in FigJam.
What’s New
What’s next for Sketch?
A blog post from Sketch co-founders outlining their strategy for 2023 and beyond. After layoffs in October, they’ve refocused as a company and doubled down on their two-apps approach: “You shouldn’t have to learn how to use design tools to give feedback on designs, test a prototype, or inspect files for handoff. Meanwhile, designers should get an editing experience that speaks to their needs and workflows, without any distractions.”
They’ve also redesigned their website (looks fantastic!) and are launching the community forum on February 23rd. The primary focus is on polishing the apps and talking to users. One of the new Sketch features is support for opening .fig files — the tables have turned indeed.
Magician enters public beta
“A magical AI-powered design tool for Figma” is now available to the public with a 7‑day trial.
Using Figma
7 things I learned the hard way updating my design system
Epic thread by Molly Hellmuth on the best practices for using property, variant, and Auto Layout features. She just rebuilt her popular UI Prep design system with the latest Figma features and learned a lot in the process.
Gooey blobs in Figma
Pretty cool tutorial and community file on creating custom animated blobs without any plugins. A really smart technique combining blur with classic dodge & burn!
Team, project, and file organization
Luis Ouriach wrote a massive multi-part guide on structuring teams, organizing projects, and managing files in Figma.
Light and dark mode setup with design tokens
Katie Cooper shows how to use the Tokens Studio plugin to set up light and dark modes in the project.
Top 3 AI Figma Plugins for Product Designers
Sara Brunettini shows how AI-powered Figma plugins can be used to streamline your workflow and make the design process a breeze. “Imagine AI assisting with repetitive tasks like naming layers, designing light/dark modes or even generating micro-copy for you. And the best part is these plugins integrate seamlessly with Figma.”
Backstage
Figma’s Early Days: Growth Marketing Lessons
Sean Whitney, Craft Ventures investor and early Figma team member, sat down with Toni Gemayel, Figma’s first growth marketer, to talk about how he scaled growth marketing at Figma. While at Figma, Toni launched their Design Systems website, built an experimental Variable Fonts plugin before the native support was shipped, and was heavily involved with the design community.