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.

During the last couple of weeks, Figma released multiple updates that were in the works for a long time. First, after being introduced at Config Europe in 2020, Interactive Components are finally out of closed beta and available to everyone! The power they provide is hard to take for granted, and I’m excited about using them in my projects and getting fully interactive components from the Community.

Second, FigJam rolled out its biggest release to date: new pricing, open sessions, widgets, plugins, embedded content, new shapes, code blocks, templates… oh my! I included a few tweets from the team giving an insider look at how these features were built, along with some of my favorite new widgets.

Last but not least, read how Google’s Material Design is teaming up with Figma to bring great UI from design to code, see how GitHub uses Jan Six’s plugin to work with design tokens, and listen to Dylan Field talking about creators economy and low-ego leadership.

Enjoy the issue!

It only fits that the 50th issue of the newsletter is the largest one so far. While on average every issue has about 27 links, this one is 41! Between the Schema conference, the release of Branching, and major updates to popular no-code tools, there are lots of good things to write about. 

If you missed the Schema conference, this issue contains the most complete list of video recordings. They’re not listed on Figma’s YouTube yet, and some of the smaller talks and panels are not available in the event account. I gathered links from a few sources, so spread the word and enjoy great content! While I attended the online conference and watched the first few talks live, I still have to catch up with a few of the later talks.

Special thanks to Webflow for sponsoring Figmalion. Check out their Webflow Inspo newsletter for quality design and no-code resources.

Welcome to the new Figmalion 2.0β! Just a few weeks before Figmalion’s 2nd birthday and 50th issue, I launched the new brand and website. It’s not just a newsletter anymore, but the biggest knowledge base about Figma. All 1,325 links from the past issues have been organized by type and topics, so now you can browse for cool resources or dive into specific areas of interest like Developer Handoff or Design Systems. There is still more to do, but the new website forms a solid foundation for future updates and improvements.

Fun fact: the name ​“Figmalion” is a pun on Pygmalion, a legendary sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved. (There is also a really fun play based on this story by George Bernard Shaw.) That’s where the bust on the old logo came from, but eventually, I fell out of love with it. Meet the new logo by lettering artist Anna Chistyakova! I truly love it and hope it’ll stick for a long time.

Happy Monday! Last week, Figma announced Schema, their new design systems conference. The lineup of speakers and agenda look great. I already applied to attend, but all talks will be recorded and shared the week after the event anyway. Looking forward to it!

👉 Speaking of design systems, I mentioned a new tool I’ve been working on in the previous issue. Accessible Palette is a free app for designing color systems with consistent lightness and contrast. It’s built on CIELAB/​LCh color space and has some really useful features, like shifting Hue of the color range, checking contrast ratios against any color in the palette, or using an improved contrast algorithm from an upcoming WCAG 3 Working Draft. This tool was born out of a real-life project, and I believe it can be a huge help to anyone working on design systems or caring about accessibility.

🤓 See why the HSL/HSV color model sucks for systems work, WCAG 2.1 contrast ratios shouldn’t be trusted, and sometimes Figma isn’t enough in my article at Wildbit blog: Accessible Palette: Stop using HSL for color systems.

I believe this issue breaks all previous records for a number of major features shipped in two weeks. Just look at this list: FigJam plugins and widgets with custom objects; audio calls, cursor chat, and high fives; people mentions in the Community; updates to FigJam on the iPad; improved experience for admins of Teams and Organizations; and even a revision to the Education plan! I’m most excited to see what smart FigJam widgets the community will come up with — the possibilities are truly endless!

In August, I worked on a fun project of reconstructing the color system of Postmark and making it more accessible. That project involved a ton of research on color science, and I ended up building an internal tool based on HCL/​LCh color model with built-in support for WCAG 2.1 and 3.0 contrast checks. Last week, I got a great opportunity to spend some time turning this internal tool into a public app. Can’t wait to write about the app and why the HSL color model shouldn’t be used for color systems!

Hello 👋 Figmalion is back to its regular biweekly schedule after a short summer break.

While August is usually the quietest time of the year, the last three weeks have been quite busy for the Figma community. First, a long-awaited feature was released — now you can move published components between files without breaking their connection! In addition, Figma shipped a few improvements to libraries and components. Font Awesome (which is shipped with Figma by default) switched their entire icon design process to Figma. Smashing Magazine published a guide on useful plugins. A few members of the Figma community were guests on the podcasts — check out conversations with Miggi and Gleb. Lastly, there are a few great tips on using components and organizing design systems. Enjoy the issue!

It’s only been a few weeks since Figma released whopping 30 quality updates to the editor, and this week they shipped another 9! While most of them are quite small, one was long-anticipated by the design community — shadows are no longer displayed through transparent areas of objects! This means they behave the same way as shadows in CSS, making developer handoff so much easier. Speaking of handoff, I’m excited to welcome Zeplin as a sponsor — I used it in my work in the past, and it’s a fantastic product.

The design community stayed busy as well. Greg Huntoon shared a smart and easy-to-use way to version components using Variants. Jordan Singer announced Tricycle, a set of design automation tools powered by AI. Pablo Stanley recorded his process of vectorizing sketches. Rogie released yet another plugin, this time for importing HEIC files. See all of that and two dozen other links below!

P.S. I’m taking a summer break this month, so the next issue will come out in 3 weeks, on August 23rd. A major update to Figmalion is in the works and getting close to being finished — can’t wait to launch it soon!