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.

On Tuesday, March 28th, 2023 at 9:00 AM PT, Figma will livestream the launch of 30+ little updates ​“that will be BIG improvements to your workflow”. The video teaser mentions the preview of blend modes and on-hover previews 👀 Sign up for a free webinar by their team of designer advocates and product managers.

Figma published their internal design team career levels and accompanying Skills Chart widget to the Figma Community! Last year they refreshed the leveling framework and Design Manager Sara Culver wrote a detailed post documenting this work. For additional context, I highly recommend Noah Levin’s thread on this project. Also, don’t miss their templates for performance reviews and calibration.

FTE is an open-source tool for creating an automatic communication channel between design decisions (represented as design tokens) and code. The main objective of the tool is to simplify the standardization and update of these decisions throughout all the digital products sharing a Design System. Its creator Daniel Casado shows how to install, configure, and use the FTE to transform design tokens (either as Figma styles or from Token Studio) into CSS styles.

“Now you can create tables in FigJam right from the bottom tool bar. Organize information and ideas in custom-sized tables to build project plans, decision matrices, pro/​con lists, and more.” Check out a quick demo video and read the blog post on how the product team arrived at the approach, tackled multiplayer bugs, and finessed design details.

Such a fun thread by designer Jakub Świadek on how the FigJam team redesigned the sticky note curl. See also another thread by Noah Finer on how it was implemented with CSS and SVG animations.

“You can now seamlessly copy-and-paste between your iPad and desktop. Just open a FigJam file on your iPad, and another FigJam or Figma file on your desktop at the same time. Copy something on iPad and an in-app notification on desktop will ask you if you want to paste the selection from the other device. You can copy-and-paste from desktop to iPad, too.”

Paid resources are finally available on Community! The days of dealing with license keys, paying through 3rd-party websites, and importing downloaded files are over. As a customer, you can try most resources before buying, and if something went wrong easily apply for a refund.

While this release makes the whole experience much smoother for end users, it’s a huge change for Community creators — ​“there’s no dealing with payment integrations, license keys, emailing files, or even managing refunds — just set your price, publish, and start earning”. A few years ago, I was delighted to learn that some creators earn a living from selling Figma plugins and resources. This will become much more common now because of additional exposure and a lower barrier to entry. There has never been a better time to start contributing to the design community.

The Figma Store is now available in the EU, and to celebrate the occasion they’ve dropped a new swag collection. My favorite additions are the new washi tape, Dress Code hat, and Toolkit mug!

Figma always supported #RGB and #RRGGBB CSS syntaxes in color fills, but now you can also use rgb(), rgba(), hsl(), and hsla(). Pretty neat!

Minor performance update that makes animations of interactive components in prototypes much smoother and faster.

On the Enterprise plan, organization admins and workspace admins can now enable libraries for all files in a given workspace. On the Organizations plan, organization admins will see an updated layout for the libraries tab in the admin settings.

This year’s Config is happening live in San Francisco and streaming worldwide on June 21–22. Registration opens on April 4th. Save the dates!

Prototypes are now even more powerful, with new ways to upload, edit, and interact with videos. See demos at Figma’s Twitter thread and try it out in the playground. Great follow-up update to the release of videos in October!

“For Organization and Enterprise customers, we improved how the members table in the admin console loads. The new experience starts rolling out today for organization admins and workspace admins. As a result of the change, the members table should load much faster for Figma instances with more than 1,000 users.”

Bloomberg reports (see the Google cache version without the paywall) that the United States Department of Justice is preparing an antitrust lawsuit seeking to block Adobe’s $20 billion acquisition of Figma. A case is expected to be filed as soon as next month. ​“The antitrust division is concerned the deal — one of the largest takeovers of a private software maker — would reduce options for design software used by creative professionals.”

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.