In-person attendees of Config 2023 found a copy of a playful zine in their swag bags. Figma collaborated with It’s Nice That on The Playbook to showcase the benefits of spontaneous thinking and curiosity through design. Inside, there is a piece on ​“how to embrace (and enjoy) endless iteration” by Chief Product Officer Yuhki Yamashita, as well as an investigation into what it truly means to be a collaborative engineer by Chief Technology Officer Kris Rasmussen. If you prefer getting hands-on rather than sitting down with an essay, there are also a host of activities to tackle.

“There is a cohort of world-renowned graphic designers whose work people know whether they’re into design or not, and Paula Scher’s name sits squarely on that list. With this in mind, we invited the Pentagram partner to share her ​“10 rules for play” noted down over a formidable and long-lasting career.”

Joey Banks spent a lot of time after Config adjusting component libraries to use the new Figma features. In this issue of Baseline, he dives deep into variables and wrote an epic guide on what they are, how he is using them, and a few shortcuts to help make workflows and creation more efficient. My favorite tip on using the number variables: ​“With your cursor inside an input, tap the equal = key on your keyboard to launch the variable list quickly, or hold Shift + click. To remove a variable, click into the input and tap Backspace twice.” (Note that the = shortcut may go away in the future.)

This part of his conclusion brought back the topic of usability vs. visibility started by component properties: ​“One thing I still find to be a little challenging within this new way of building and viewing components in Figma is that so much of the previous on-canvas visual representation is now absent using variables. Previously, if there were two density sizes used or if a layer was toggled as hidden within a particular situation, that was easy to see, as we had to build it out as a visual variant. With variables, much of that information, such as sizing, booleans, and color adjustments, is all within the Variables modal and not on the canvas.”

Starting July 6th, Figma Enterprise customers have the option to host key parts of their Figma and FigJam files in the EU. This feature is designed to give Figma customers in the EU greater flexibility to meet local compliance and data privacy requirements.

“For added security, organization admins on the Enterprise plan can set an idle session timeout to log out users as soon as 12 hours after they become inactive. By default, Figma automatically logs users out when they are inactive for 21 days.”

Intuit is the parent company for products such as Quickbooks, TurboTax, Mint, Mailchimp, and Credit Karma. Intuit Design System (IDS) is used as a foundational system that other multidimensional design systems are built on top of. Nate Baldwin wrote about creating a design token taxonomy for it: ​“Token names are how design tokens are referenced and identified by consumers. But at the core, a ​“name” is more of an ordered representation of a catalog system and API. This catalog system and API is also known as a token taxonomy. Building a clear taxonomy assisted us in appropriately and consistently classifying tokens, as well as providing a scalable and predictable naming convention for consumers.”

Damien Correll, Creative Director at Figma, shares some thoughts on the Config brand. Creating an identity for a brief event is an interesting challenge, and Figma’s brand studio does an incredible job every time. The pictograms were my favorite part — they are in lively motion on the screen but feel monumental IRL as wooden cutouts or a statue at Moscone, almost at odds with the temporal nature of the brand.

Joey Banks’ recap of everything announced at Config. (I was lucky to meet Joey and share the scene with him at Config, and his deep knowledge of Figma and expertise in design systems are second to none. Highly recommend subscribing to his Baseline newsletter.)

Dan Mall is an expert in design systems and a fellow designer from Philadelphia. Dan organized a post-Config basketball game, hosted a special dinner, and even captained the winning team at the Figmatch design competition. His recap focuses on what makes in-person conferences really special.

“Grab teammates’ attention in stickies or any text in your FigJam files by typing @ followed by their name.”

Latest diagramming improvements in FigJam:

• Choose from over 10 new drag-and-drop shapes including star, plus, and hexagon
• Straight line connectors now anchor to the center of objects for more visually streamlined flows
• Swap between shapes quickly as you build diagrams

Kyler Phillips launched a really useful unofficial guide to events and meetups taking place during Config 2023 in San Francisco. I’ll be there for a few days and try to join some of them, depending on jet lag and energy level.

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.