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!

While launching this newsletter in 2019, I was worried there may not be enough content to justify a new issue every two weeks. Clearly, I underestimated how vibrant and active the Figma community will become. Since then, I’ve heard from readers that some issues can be a little overwhelming — not surprising, considering, on average, there are 27 links per issue and sometimes as many as 41. The launch of Figmalion 2.0 in October simplified my publishing process, so now I’m finally ready to start sending the newsletter weekly. Hope you’ll enjoy shorter and more regular issues in the future!

P.S. Thanks to Denislav Jeliazkov for sponsoring the last few issues! Check out his book ​“Master UI Design Elements — The hidden secrets” or follow him on Twitter for great threads and tips on UI design.

Welcome to the last issue of 2021! I hope you’re taking some time off work and enjoying the holiday season. It’s been a busy year for me — besides launching the new website and redesigning this newsletter, I shared 715 links in 26 issues of the Figmalion. To find the best things to share, I reviewed 30–35 thousand items in my internal daily digest. That’s quite a lot! 😅

The team at Figma was busy too. Here is a shortlist of my favorite updates shipped this year: quick action menu, bulleted and numbered lists, desktop app for Apple Silicon, Branching, knockout shadow, Interactive Components, new comments, and of course FigJam! (Reminder that App Updates topic is the most comprehensive way to see all changes.)

Looking forward to what 2022 will bring us!

Every year I look forward to Design Tools Survey. The first time I wrote about it in 2019, Sketch was a leading tool in all categories, but Figma was catching up and was called ​“The most exciting tool of 2020”. In 2020, Figma destroyed the competition in all categories related to design and prototyping. This year with the launch of FigJam, they went after digital whiteboarding and got a solid 2nd place in this category after Miro. At this point, Figma and FigJam cover all stages of the design process except user research and testing. My favorite thing in the report is how excited the design community is about Figma — it’s the most popular tool by far.

Healthy competition keeps everyone on their toes, and as designers, we are lucky to have access to a variety of fantastic tools. Can’t wait to see how our tools will change in 2022!

Hello! 👋 If you’re in the US, I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. This week, I’m thankful for the comments redesign that makes it much easier to work with feedback. Great update!

Marc Edwards, the creator of iStat Menus and a few other Mac apps, wrote a blog post comparing hardware utilization by Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, and Affinity Designer. As expected, Figma’s web app can’t load CPU as heavily as native apps, but it uses GPU a lot for some operations. Helpful to know if you’re looking to get a new Mac.

Josh Cusick from the Design Systems team at Microsoft wrote how they build and maintain an internal Figma UI kit. Lots of good tips on organizing files and preparing for developer handoff. See also an in-depth guide on using design tokens and tips for file organization from Ridd.

If you’re reading this newsletter in your email client, chances are my latest project went well! 😅 Lately, I’ve been working on the final major piece of the new Figmalion 2.0 — moving the newsletter from MailChimp to a custom setup. The new website and content are handled by a powerful Craft CMS, mailing lists and campaigns are managed by the Campaign plugin, and the emails are delivered with Postmark’s Broadcast Stream (hey, I work there!). Now I finally have more control over email templates, can stop copy-pasting content from the website to MailChimp, and save time and money during the publishing process. Hopefully, this setup will help me switch to a weekly sending schedule soon, as issues have been getting too long for a while.

In the meantime, Figma released plugin parameters accessible from the keyboard to speed up the workflow. It was also time for their regular Maker Weeks, where many cool projects were presented — see a roundup at the end of the issue. Christine Vallaure wrote a great post on designing with relative font sizes, and Rafa shared a few highlights from switching to Sketch 😮 Last but not least, the Automator plugin by Jordan Singer is now the hottest project and a few folks have already shared their automations made during the private beta.