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.
Joey Banks on component properties: “In the past few weeks, I’ve had the chance to become more comfortable creating components that contain component properties. What has helped me the most has been to think of this new feature as an additional way, not a separate way, to further organize and create components and variants that scale with the library and system.”
Vic, a systems designer working on design systems at Microsoft, wrote a case study on Component Properties with practical examples, some interesting issues and workarounds, and thoughts on why they might be moving away from base components.
Molly Hellmuth with 5 step-by-step examples on how and when to use Component Properties.
If you’re feeling lost and unsure of where to start with Config’s 68 sessions, this article provides a good round-up of conference highlights.
An interview with Thierry Blancpain, co-founder of Grilli Type, one of the font foundries that were a part of Figma’s variable fonts beta.
This Week in Startups interviewed Jordan Singer, founder of Diagram and creator of the Automator plugin.
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.