Figma fixed a number of bugs that should make your branch merges go a lot smoother.
Now organization admins can better control which widgets are available to their organization’s members.
The main menu order was updated to reach full parity between Figma and FigJam.
Welcome to the big post-Config issue! Dylan Field announced lots of improvements to Figma and FigJam during his keynote, so let’s dive in. FigJam got a new collection of widgets for working with tasks and issues in Jira, Asana, and GitHub, as well as cute greeting cards and voice memos. Figma finally got dark mode, variable fonts, spring animations, individual borders, and component properties. Auto Layout was completely redesigned, and now it’s even more powerful. The newly introduced Spotlight makes it easy to gather and guide everyone through a demo. There are even more updates and improvements, so I suggest watching the keynote and going through some of the links I collected. Enjoy!
It’s the week of two-day Config 2022! What’s on your wishlist for product announcements? Is it dark mode? Long-promised font previews? Wrapping elements inside Auto Layout? Multi-page prototypes? Or maybe a new flavor of delicious prototype noodles? Whatever it is, I’ve never been disappointed by the keynote and really look forward to it!
Hi friends! It’s been a minute. On February 25th, I took a break from Figmalion after Russia attacked my home country Ukraine. While I moved to the US almost 10 years ago, my family and friends are still there. Most of them had to flee their homes to get to safety. After two months, dealing with war and its consequences became a part of our daily lives, and now I’m trying to return to regular activities and get some sense of normalcy. I’m grateful to everyone who sent me words of support — that meant a lot!
Working on this issue reminded me how much I love design, great tools, and this community. So many exciting things happened during the last two months! While I couldn’t include everything, this issue should be a good recap of the most important things.
Performance updates are always welcome: “We’ve reduced the amount of CPU usage FigJam and Figma take up. Large files with many users should run more smoothly now.”
Recently I’ve shared a few no-code tools for generating code from Figma mockups, but this one is different and works in reverse by generating Figma components and variants from your code and Storybook stories. Nifty idea!
Bruno Figueiredo talks to Miguel Cardona about his journey to the world of design, work at Figma, and design education.
A few improvements to the file browser. As you type in the search field, Figma now shows a preview of matching search results, sectioned off by resource type (files, projects, people, and so on). There is also supposed to be a new filter by a file type, but I couldn’t find it 🤷♂️
In this tutorial, one of the designers from Noun Project gives a few quick tips on using Figma’s “Smart Animate” tool to animate icons in your UI.
A cool explainer of impressive interactive effects made with Figma, Spline, and Anima.
Amanda Kleha, CCO at Figma: “We want Figma to be a place where everyone can participate in the design process together—from brainstorm to build—while also making it easy to stay organized and flow from one task to the next. That’s why we’re excited to launch new FigJam plans, as well as a new Figma Enterprise plan, to welcome more people into the design process.”
FigJam is out of beta with new paid plans for teams that want to collaborate without limits. Figma also got a new Enterprise plan “that provides the structure, granular controls, advanced security, and support that organizations need to support all the groups that take part in their design process.” (The Twitter thread by Sean Chin provides a curious look behind the scenes on how long it takes to ship something like this.)
A few bug fixes related to prototypes.
Hello from the snowy Northeast! Congrats to the Figma team for finally getting @figma handle on Twitter. It’s a small thing, but I’m sure it took a lot of work to make it happen. (I have a glimpse of hope that one day Twitter will let me take over someone’s suspended @figmalion account.)
The community has been talking a lot about the mechanics of components — usability vs. maintainability, managing spacing, and automating grunt work. Lots of good topics in this issue!
P.S. Thanks to Webflow for sponsoring Figmalion again! Don’t miss the official trailer — it’s a dramatic masterpiece.
Hello! A few interesting news from the last week: Figma explained how data shaped a new comments experience, Spotify updated their icon system, and Framer announced the beta release of Sites, their new no-code service. See also a deep dive on hexagons and layers naming by Figma Designer Advocates.
Have a wonderful week!
Hi there! This is the first weekly edition of Figmalion, so it’s shorter and more digestible. Last week, the new comments were rolled out to everyone after release was postponed in November because of a bug. Figma is beta testing the iPad app, and I’m really excited to use it with FigJam — so many great possibilities for spatial thinking. They also launched the Figma Store with really fun and well-designed merch. The website itself is fantastic as well, with witty copywriting and an Easter egg when you’re inactive. Treat yourself to something nice!