Figma launched network access restrictions on the Enterprise plan to enhance security measures. This feature allows organization admins to prevent employees from accidentally authenticating into personal Figma accounts while on the corporate network.

An insightful essay from Mills Baker, the Head of Design at Substack, about gloomy possibilities for software designers in the coming years. ​“Who was the architect of your apartment building or house? You probably have no idea. As the construction industry matured, and best practices were commodified, the percentage of buildings requiring the direct involvement of architects plummeted. Builders can now choose from an array of standard layouts that cover most of their needs; materials and design questions, too, have been standardized, and reflect economies of scale more than local or unique contextual realities. Buildings are, it’s true, perhaps a little worse than they used to be, but the trade-offs overall are clearly what people want.”

“As I spend this Valentine’s Day working in Figma, putting the final touches on my Founders Who UX program, with hearts in my eyes (and a stomach ache), I began romantically reminiscing about all the tools that helped get me here. What better way to express my gratitude to them on this day than a love letter?”

Four new fonts in FigJam to convey just the right message or feeling. ​“Simple” is a new standard font for long-form text and easy scanning. ​“Bookish” is a serif font that adds a touch of formality to headers and quotes. ​“Technical” is a fixed-width font that mimics the look and feel of code. ​“Scribbled” is a script-based font that’s perfect for comments and annotations. All fonts were custom-made for FigJam by OH no Type Co and come with lots of beautiful details and juicy ligatures (have you seen the exclamation marks?!)

This is one of the FigJam brand updates that Figma has been working on since last year and just started to roll out. Make sure to check out this Twitter thread by Damien Correll, Creative Director at Figma.

Seems like Figma reversed the original policy prohibiting third-party payment tools and delayed the launch of the paid resources in the Community until March 7th. While I believe Figma’s 15% fee for covering transactional costs and acting as the merchant of record is very fair, I applaud their flexibility and openness to community feedback. (Historically, Gumroad was one of the most popular platforms for selling digital products, but with their recent price increase I don’t know why would anyone go with them instead of a built-in community marketplace.)

On the Enterprise plan, Figma introduced external content controls so companies can keep everyone’s work inside their Figma organization and protect their ideas. When access to external content is disabled, domain users can’t collaborate in files, projects, or teams outside of their Figma organization.

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.

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.

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.

A guide to using Tokens Studio to create flexible component libraries: ​“In headless design systems, the visual representation of components decouples from the logic required for their creation. Your building blocks gain UI after you apply tokens to them.”

I believe eventually starting work on top of a standard headless library will be normalized, similar to standard libraries in programming languages. How many times do we have to recreate all states of a button or create modals from scratch?

The team at Deliveroo built a library of ​“file management goodies” to bring more context to their designs and help people across the business navigate design files more efficiently. Section banners, flow and screen details, highlights, notes, and linked resources helped their team annotate their thinking within Figma.

Jackie Zhang writes about approaches to enhance team communication through logically structuring Figma files, labeling and annotating your designs, and hooking up all your files in a single FigJam flow. I particularly like the last recommendation and going to try it on the next project.

“Beginning February 2023, Figma will add support for paid files, plugins, and widgets on the Figma Community. Eligible creators will be able to publish paid resources and users will be able purchase resources directly from the Figma Community.” As a community creator, I’m genuinely excited about this — I’ve had a few commercial plugin ideas in the past, but was put off by handling payments.

That said, the announcement raised some questions. All community files must switch to Figma’s payment platform, but existing plugins and widgets may continue to be sold through 3rd-party payment sites. Rogie provided additional details in his Twitter thread.

Now it’s easier to track changes to components and styles. A new icon shows when styles or instances have changed, lets you accept changes for individual instances or layers, and even shows a before vs. after preview! See a quick demo by Jacob Miller.

Ever wanted to collaborate in FigJam using virtual reality? A note from the developer: ​“We wouldn’t build a better tool than Figma, so we used their super SDK to write a plugin that integrates with our XR application. We develop our applications for Snapdragon Spaces technology, available for Lenovo A3 glasses, as well as for Quest 2 and Quest Pro. We use Unity technology, so in the future the app can be open on any device like Android/​iOS/​MagicLeap/​Quest etc. The app is still a prototype, but we consider of going forward and release it in some day.”

Framer published a selection of the best Framer websites made last year. Lots of great designs to get inspired from, but I didn’t expect to see such a heavy dose of personal websites of designers and agencies.

“Tune in to hear from Dominique Ward, Head of DesignOps at Atlassian, and Adam Fry-Pierce, Chief of Staff at Google, who will dive in to how to scale your DesignOps team. They will dive into questions such as ​‘What frameworks can you use to build out L&D on the design team?’ or ​‘How do you build rapport with your cross functional teams?’”

Miggi with two great tips on managing gradients. I wish we didn’t need to resolve to a 100 pixels square hack, but often it gets the job done!

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.

A few changes to team controls and permissions on Enterprise and Organization plans.

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.