Can you believe Figma turns 10 this month?! I first tried it during the closed beta in March 2016 and thought it was silly. A year later, I was thoroughly impressed by their progress and features. In 2018 it became my primary tool and I fell in love with it, starting this newsletter and writing a book.
I’m taking a break this week to travel and spend time with my family, so the next issue will come out on August 29th. Stay cool!
Figma shipped a batch of lovely small improvements. See demo videos in their blog post, or read a full list with a few behind-the-scene links below.
One of my personal favorites 🙌 Organize the gradient panel faster by double-clicking on gradient stops to evenly distribute them.
Annotation is a lot smoother with Pencil strokes no longer getting clipped or disturbing Auto Layout in frames. See also Marcin Wichary’s short thread on how they got to this solution.
The fresh look of the Figma Community with improved search and a new browsing experience makes it easier to discover and differentiate between categories like product (Figma or FigJam), use cases (like design systems), and resources (widgets or plugins).
A few navigational improvements (e.g. the addition of breadcrumbs and a new page layout) were released on all plans along with updates to workspaces available only on the Enterprise plan.
In May, Dylan Field announced that Figma incorporated in Japan, set up an office in Tokyo, and started working on localizing Figma into Japanese. Last week, they launched a fully localized product interface, website, and in-region support for Japanese users.
Nice shipment of improvements to the FigJam iPad app, branches review in Figma, and email notifications. You can also import the contents of a Miro board into FigJam now!
Fantastic article by Shirley Miao about the complexities and hidden challenges of building Figma’s dark mode: “We wanted to build a solution that wouldn’t just solve the existing need for a new feature, but would be flexible enough to scale with us as the product evolved. Doing so would make it easier to onboard new engineers, tackle unforeseen challenges, and introduce new themes down the road. The trick was developing an approach that would be easy to implement and maintain, while also ensuring that it was regression proof.”
Interesting talk by Zeplin’s co-founder and Head of Product Berk Cebi on the evolution of design systems over the last 10 years, the role that design tools play in this process, and the unfortunate disconnect between our design components, code, and documentation. He suggests design tokens may be one of the potential solutions and shows how they can be used to connect the parts of the design system.
Nice improvement! Too bad I can’t stamp +1 on my ideas ten times anymore… BTW, there is a cool easter egg on really old stamps.
The team at Figma talked to 50+ designers, PMs, engineers, researchers, and writers about collaborating with other members of their team, and discovered five specific behaviors that can make or break your team’s vibes.
A great-looking game made entirely in Figma. The creativity of this community never stops surprising me.
Hi there! 👋 I’ve been catching up on the past episodes of the Design Details podcast and noticed that the “cool things” that hosts share every episode is one of my favorite segments. Figured I’ll borrow the idea and start sharing some of my favorite tools and resources not related to Figma at the end of issues as well. Let me know if you find them interesting!
Everything slows down during the summer, including the release cadence at Figma. It’s been 6 weeks since the last time they’ve shipped a few small updates, and I started wondering if the team is taking a well-deserved break after Config 2022 or working on something big again. Well, widgets in Figma are quite a big deal indeed! If you think they’re just glorified plugins, I suggest playing with Interactive Figmaland to change your mind. Looking forward to seeing what the community will do with all the new possibilities.
🇺🇸 Happy 4th of July, if you’re in the US!
Super useful tip: double-click on the icon of an object in the Layers panel to jump to it. (Double-clicking on a name will trigger renaming.)
Middle-clicking or ⌘-clicking on the hyperlink goes directly to the target.
A short overview of the most important parts of Figma for developers.
A couple of weeks ago, Figma experienced its worst service disruption to date. This postmortem by their engineering leaders is a very transparent look at what happened and the steps they are taking to prevent it in the future: “The incident was caused by a bug in AWS’s ElastiCache service with Cluster Mode enabled. The bug is such that high Publish / Subscribe workloads can trigger a sudden and sustained spike in Engine CPU utilization. Due to the complex nature of this bug, we did not hit it for weeks despite having moved our Publish / Subscribe workloads to a Clustered-Mode Enabled Redis instance much earlier.”
This deep dive into the making of the feature is my favorite kind of a blog post on Figma’s blog: “Building spring animations took our engineering team back to the classroom — to make animations that are both natural and accurate, we borrowed principles from physics. We’re excited to share the mechanics behind the movement, and the story of how spring animations bounced their way into Figma.”
Rasmus, who used to work on this at Figma, shares his workflow for designing in P3 color space and exporting assets in sRGB. Sadly, it’s still a very tricky process.
Figma launched a partnership with Google for Education to bring Figma and FigJam directly to Chromebooks, the most popular personal computing device for students. This is a huge opportunity for students to learn the same app used by professional designers. (That said, I still warmly remember days of using keygens with Photoshop 4.)
Rasmus Andersson shows how to make a simple font in Figma.
Neat shortcut: ⌘-click on the Auto Layout padding field to adjust all paddings.