Steve Dennis reflects on his experiences of using Figma and tries to identify the biggest pain points. It’s a thoughtful list of possible improvements that I pretty much agree with. Design tokens and the official marketplace would be at the top of my list.

Fons Mans recreates the new iPhone 14 Pro wallpapers in Figma.

Zander Whitehurst shows how to animate the newly introduced Dynamic Island in Figma supafast.

Insightful interview about the role of community in Figma’s go-to-market strategy early on. ​“As Senior Director of Marketing, Claire Butler joined Figma as one of the first ten employees and the company’s first business hire. She began shaping the company’s bottoms-up growth strategy and laying the track for a vibrant community before the product was even publicly available.” The conversation is also available as a podcast.

An interview with Badrul Farooqi, the first Product Manager (and 18th employee) at Figma. He spent nearly five years at the company and worked on the two largest customer-facing products at Figma: the core design tool and Figma Community. Learn about solving problems for the most discerning customers, the benefits of being an internal transfer PM, how and where to talk to customers for maximum benefit, and more.

Yuhki Yamashita is the Chief Product Officer at Figma and leads the product and design teams. In this interview with the Merit Office Hours, they talk about the value of process, adapting to asynchronous work, and the importance of mentorship.

“The Figma app allows your team to riff on ideas together in real-time, present designs to get stakeholder feedback, and share the latest updates with everyone — without ever leaving Microsoft Teams.” See also the conversation with Jon Friedman, Corporate VP of Design & Research at Microsoft, about collaboration, the importance of design systems and toolchains in freeing up time for ambitious work, and why it’s worth it to change a company’s culture — even if it’s hard.

Nice improvement to the search — now you can find files based on page and frame names, in addition to the underlying text.

This demo of the upcoming Ando plugin blew up over the last few days. Antonio Cao is working on a plugin using Stable Diffusion to generate AI art based on visual and text prompts. The new wave of AI design tools may be the biggest change in our industry after the introduction of multiplayer by Figma in 2016.

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.