“Figma is making it easier for admins to find and manage draft folders of members and guests who have been removed from their organization, now known as ​”unassigned drafts.” Organization admins on Organization and Enterprise plans can now access unassigned drafts directly from the admin console. Starting today, Pro team admins can also manage them from a new tab in the Pro team admin console.”

Joey Banks with a deep dive on applying and organizing variables in Figma: “…if there’s one thing I’ve learned about variables, it’s that nearly every team takes a slightly different approach when it comes to creating and keeping them organized in Figma. I’d love to recap the many ways I use variables within the components and libraries I make, as well as some of the techniques and decision frameworks that have helped me most, and share with you how I approach creating and keeping them all organized, too.”

At a recent meetup, Developer Advocate Jake Albaugh shared the story of Figma’s SDS, a UI kit with a realistic code backing to help bridge the gap between design and development. As a reminder, the Simple Design System is available in the Libraries selector, Figma community, and GitHub.

The beta of UI3 is now available to everyone. Check out this list of changes made after hearing the feedback.

Linear launched a series of conversations with product leaders on how things of quality get built: ​“What is quality? It seems hard to describe and even harder to measure, but you can feel it when it’s there. You know it when you experience it.”

A great written interview with Katie Dill, Stripe’s Head of Design, about craft and quality, functionality and beauty in products, rituals to level up product quality, and keeping quality a priority as companies scale.

Kaitie Chambers and Miggi kicked off the first episode of monthly Release Notes, where they dropped new features and recapped everything shipped in September. Readers of this newsletter will be already familiar with most of the changes, but there are some new things worth covering. 

UI3 rolls out for everyone on October 10th. The biggest change in the final version is the return of fixed panels — Figma listened to the feedback from the design community and closed the gaps. The panels still float when the Minimize UI (Shift-\) mode is turned on. Other changes include the always visible Auto Layout pixel values along the resize modes, the layer header showing 3 reorganized actions by default and one more when the panel is wider on larger screens, and showing the component library info in the component properties panel. It’s now even easier to set the Auto Layout object’s width and height to Fill Container or Hug Contents via the quick actions menu (Cmd-K) or a custom macOS shortcut.

After research or brainstorming sessions, FigJam stickies can now be sorted by color, author, stamp count, or stamp type in addition to the previously announced FigJam AI. Figma Slides now supports custom slide deck templates, which can even be published in the community. Slides are now viewable on your mobile device, so you can view and join a presentation from anywhere. 

Joey Banks shows one of the newly announced features. When objects are duplicated, rotated, and then duplicated again, Figma will continue that rotation with subsequent copies of your object.

Figma added iPhone 16 (including Pro, Pro Max, and Plus), Apple Watch Series 10 (42mm and 46mm), and Android (Compact, Medium, Expanded) to the Frames menu. If you need vector iPhone 16 device frames for the prototyping, Keeyen published the community file with different models and colors.

The AI feature Make Designs is back under a new name, First Draft, which I greatly prefer as it sets more accurate expectations. (Curiously, that was the original internal project name.) ​“We’re also introducing some key updates, like letting you choose from one of four libraries depending on your needs — whether it’s a wireframing library to help you sketch out less opinionated, lo-fi primitives, or higher-fidelity libraries to provide more visual expressions or patterns to explore.”

I believe that wasn’t previously shared: ​“Our vision is for First Draft to extend beyond our current libraries and allow organizations to incorporate their own custom libraries. In the future, teams will be able to draft ideas using their company’s unique design language without having to sift through hundreds of components by hand.”

Describing design details with plain text is a nice way to communicate the intent to developers.

You can now rename files in the desktop app by double-clicking the tab name.

A deep dive into Figma’s brand refresh. ​“Figma’s visual identity has gotten a bold refresh. From playful primitives to a vibrant new palette, we’re unveiling our latest brand evolution — one that speaks to all product builders.” 

I love how Figma showcased the community work on a giant screen at Times Square.

Olivia Hingley for It’s Nice That: ​“Sitting at the core of the concept is a new brand idea: ​‘build by design’. Short and sweet, the idea reinstates that design is more than just a skill, department or process, it’s the ​“gravitational centre” of the brand. Three brand beliefs come from this idea: ​‘design is everyone’s business’, which speaks to the flexibility and broad nature of design, while the second, ​‘craft as a differentiator’, centers on the care and attention to detail that Figma propagates. […] And, the third and final belief is ​‘the idea is just the beginning’.”

“We’ve added a new export quality setting to give you more control over the file size and quality of images when exporting frames and images from Figma as JPEGs or PDFs. A new quality dropdown in Advanced export settings allows you to choose from High, Medium, or Low quality when exporting as a JPEG or PDF. Low quality will compress your images the most, resulting in the smallest file size, and High quality won’t compress images at all. If you do not select a quality setting upon export, there will be no change to how your files are exported; Figma will follow existing default settings (Medium quality for PDFs and High quality for JPEGs). Also available in FigJam.”

Nathan Curtis: ​“In 2015, I established three models of forming teams for scaling design systems: solitary, central, and federated. The article progressed through each, scoffing at solitary, considering central, and favoring federated based on the section’s positioning and proportional length. […] In this article, I’ll dig into how federated is not a choice, it’s a facet. In practice, it’s never pursued first and never without central investment. In most cases, it’s optional and its outcomes can be so expensive and frustrating that it’s not worth it. Even worse, positioning federated as a primary objective anchors so many stakeholder myths to unwind that it damages system potential and even threatens its existence.”

“Show Them” is a new course on landing page optimization by Rob Hope. He hosts one of my favorite design podcasts and curates an inspirational collection of single-page websites at One Page Love. Rob spent years analyzing landing pages, so when he shares knowledge, I’m listening! To see what his content is like, check out the bonus video on Social Proof.

The course is launching on November 19th and offers a generous 70% discount until September 18th, which I immediately took advantage of. (Not affiliated, just love Rob’s work.)

Delighted to see the internal name sneaking into a shortcut for creating a new Slides deck! BTW, both figjam.new and figma.new have also been around for a while. 

Constraints and a blend mode now display inline when toggled on, or the default is changed.

Figma just added 450 new Google Fonts to the app. Select ​“Google Fonts (8÷24 update)” from the font picker dropdown to access them.

So much polish has been added to FigJam in the last few weeks! Now, you can change the color of connectors and their text independently.

Users in Enterprise organizations with workspaces set up can now publish libraries to a workspace in addition to a team or the whole org.

My friend Helena Zhang designed a new monospaced pixel font and licensed it under the SIL Open Font License. It’s beautiful and nostalgic, bringing back so many memories from the early days of the web. The website is a lovely mix of retro vibes and a modern feel.

At Config, Figma shared a roadmap to make Figma work better for freelancers and agencies. Last week, they launched the first step towards this commitment. Now, you can transfer work to your clients on Pro plans. In the process, you can keep a copy of the work for yourself, and clients can remove collaborators when accepting a transfer to avoid accidental upgrades.

Small improvements to FigJam keep coming — now connectors can connect to the edge or arbitrary spots on an object, not just the NSEW cardinal directions.

Molly Hellmuth shares daily discoveries while working on the UI Prep design system update. There are great tips on pairing heading and body sizes, clearly marking a default text size, avoiding hiding components with a period or underline in the name, scoping variables in bulk, establishing a set of ​“surface” colors, removing a focused state, and including a special data text style for tables.

Quality-of-life improvement in FigJam — regardless of connector and shape styling, they will always have the same optical spacing. Also, alignment indicators now appear only when needed and are hidden when the object is being moved across the board. So much cleaner!

Happy birthday to my favorite design tool!

Christopher Butler wrote an essay on how details, focus, time, and taste elevate craft. ​“Attention to detail is not a personality trait; it is a manifestation of a preference for order and consistency. When that preference is fundamental, it makes it nearly impossible for a person to not see mistakes, flaws, inconsistencies, or differences. […] This is why attention to detail cannot (easily) be taught. Teaching a person to ​“see detail” requires them to care about and prefer certain forms of order.”