A guest post in Lenny Rachitsky’s newsletter by Figma VP of Product Sho Kuwamoto on the importance of feel, service, and staying close to customers. “Fast-forward to 2023, and Figma has grown beyond what I could have imagined. It’s gotten to the point where people often ask me for advice on how to prioritize features or how to run a product process. These questions are hard for me to answer, because I don’t think we do anything special. Our process is messy and we make mistakes. We create designs and then throw them away. We miscommunicate all the time and forget to write things down.”

A list of the top ten design systems from companies like Google, Atlassian, Microsoft, Shopify, IBM, AWS, Audi, Spotify, and Uber. Use them as an inspiration, a guide, or a reference to create your own design system.

Bruno Figueiredo, a Community Advocate for Figma in Portugal, came up with a fun community project — “lets all record our journeys from all across the globe heading into San Francisco. It doesn’t need to be perfect or look cinematic. Just grab your phone or camera and record the fun moments, the packing, the ride to the airport or the flight, the registration… all the little bits up until the moment the conference is about to start.” Can’t wait to see the end result!

State management is now standardized for prototypes using interactive components, scrolling, and video so that Figma can memorize the state, share it across the frames, and offer a way to reset. See a deep dive by noodles expert Niko on how to use the new features. (Also, this is my kind of joke.)

Designer Advocate Mal shows how to use the new memory control features: “To keep you informed of your memory usage, and any potential issues that may arise, we’ve adjusted our memory banners and alerts to live in the sidebar along with your pages and layers. We’ve also introduced a Memory use tool to surface memory consumed in your files by Page Content and Imported Components as well as the ability to show memory usage in the layers panel for all layers.”

FigJam now got a dedicated iPad app. I hope they’re setting the ground for a full-featured Figma for iPad app? Anyway, the new icon is dope!

A big update to FigJam — custom templates for your team, stamp your teammates’ faces to files and tag them with @mentions, emoji picker opens by typing a colon (“:”), custom color palettes (coming soon), UserTesting and Great Question integrations, Productboard widget, and new tunes! Also, explore new world-class teams’ templates and see a thread by Cai on the Figma design team’s rituals and templates they use in daily work.

In addition to a bigger release, there are a bunch of good quality-of-life improvements: toggling between thin and thick markers with Command–B (lovely animation!), an addition of Paste to replace (Command–Shift–V) command to FigJam, and connecting two objects by simply clicking on one object followed by clicking on another.

You know I love color tooling! GitHub has been doing some excellent work on its color system, which is the foundation of the Primer design system. Last year they wrote about building internal color tooling for theme building, and in the new post, they share their process for making contrast changes in both default light and dark modes as part of GitHub’s larger accessibility strategy.

Engineering Manager Alice Ching discusses how Figma draws inspiration from the gaming world in its development process. There are similarities between video game engines and Figma’s tech stack, with collaboration and creating delightful user experiences being the key aspects.

Ridd just launched Deep Dives, “a new interview series full of stories and advice to help you take a huge leap forward in your career”. In the first episode, Joey Banks gives an in-depth look at what it’s like to lead design systems at Twitter and Webflow, shares his strategies for structuring component libraries, working efficiently in Figma, and even keeping up with all of the latest plugins and tooling.

Cool technique from Nitish Khagwal for creating animated liquid mesh gradients.

Figma announced a list of speakers at this year’s Config, and the lineup is absolutely incredible! It’s a healthy mix of design leaders, makers, and folks behind the product. The agenda is coming soon, but you can get an idea of what might be coming from these answers. It’s not too late to register for an in-person or online event!

Regardless of going to the in-person Config this summer, this is a great intro of the international designer advocate team. Here is the full list for you to follow — Lauren Andres, Hugo Raymond, Hiroki Tani, Julia Kestner, Mallory Dean, Corey Lee, Alexia Danton, and Sebastian Metel.

Joe Bernstein on confronting the conflict between what’s possible in Figma and what’s practical: “Ultimately, my point here is that I over-engineered this component. Figma has the capacity to be much more than a design tool, and sometimes I use it to engineer a UI. Clearly I enjoy doing that, and I even get lost in the weeds to achieve a deeply technical solution. But design systems and asset libraries are just as much a user-centered design problem as any other publicly facing product.”

“Navigate FigJam files without taking your hands off your keyboard by using the Tab key to jump between objects on the FigJam canvas, like sections, shapes, and stickies. You can also tab between text nodes while editing text to rapidly make edits across your file. Hold Shift + Tab to tab back in the reverse direction.”

Admins now can select all users in the Members table in the admin console. New customers in Japan, Europe, UK, and Canada who require invoicing can now purchase an Organization or Enterprise plan in the local currency or USD.

The recording of Miggi’s workshop livestream on using vector tools in Figma.

Danny Sapio with a few tips on working with paths, anchors, and fills to speed up your drawing workflow in Figma. This article is also available in a video format on YouTube.

I mentioned the FigGPT plugin in the last issue, and now Edward Chechique wrote a detailed walkthrough of using this plugin. It requires an OpenAI API key but then provides direct access to ChatGPT prompts and tools for UX writing directly from the Figma document.

The team at Anima asks a controversial question, and makes a strong case for Storybook being the single source of truth: “Even though products begin with the components in the design, the end-users of those products will actually experience the components from the code. The single source of truth, then, is what users will actually see in the end.”

The community file is my favorite way to learn about and see demos of all 32 Little Big Updates.

If you missed the livestream (or had trouble joining the Zoom webinar), check out this recording of the event. Lively and exciting presentation by the Designer Advocates team!

I love reading about how design decisions are being made! This story shares a few anecdotes from the designers and engineers behind the current shipment of Little Big Updates, including multi-select search, background blur in prototypes, on-canvas previews, and hanging punctuation.