Hi there,

I hope you found a way to have some summer fun this year in spite of the pandemic. My family and I just returned from a socially distanced vacation in the New York woods, and I’m ready to get back to work on the book. It’s coming along nicely, and I can’t wait to launch it!

Meanwhile, Figma rolled out its Community to everyone and opened registration to Config Europe, which will run virtually on September 17th. Also in this issue: best practices for building a design system from Lyft, an approach to file organization from Shopify, and engineering handoff process at Uber Eats. Don’t miss a fantastic macOS Big Sur UI kit and a thoughtful post from Dylan Field on moving Figma towards a hybrid remote work model. Enjoy!

New prototyping features are the biggest news of the last two weeks — now, you can add custom easing curves to transitions and show multiple ways to interact with an object. The new integration with Bubble lets you create web apps from Figma without code. Make sure not to miss videos on using Ditto Words and creating a parallax scrolling with a combination of Figma and Framer. Enjoy!

P.S. I shared a small preview of my upcoming book ​“Designing in Figma”. Coming soon!

The Figma team is on fire! 🔥 Make sure to check out fantastic updates released during the last two weeks. Figma also announced the next Config conference, which will be in September and completely virtual.

A collection of design systems shared in Figma Community is a great resource to explore and learn from. Relay app looks very promising for integrating Figma into the development process, and in general, I enjoy seeing a rising interest in Figma from developers. If you’re into tabletop games, don’t miss the story on designing and playing Star Trek Adventures in Figma. Enjoy!

Summer is a slower time for many businesses, and a good opportunity to do an internal cleanup. This issue has an entire section on organizing your files and projects in Figma. There are also many interesting videos, like Figma55 on building stretchy layouts with Layout Grids and Constraints, and Google Design on crafting dark themes. ​“Office Hours” videos by Figma are always a great way to learn something new as well. In the end, don’t miss an interview and AMA with Dylan Field.

P.S. I added the Sponsorship page to Figmalion website. If you have a product related to Figma, design tools, or UI design, consider supporting this project and sponsoring the newsletter’s next issue.

Welcome, new subscribers from Designer News and Sidebar! It’s great to see so many new people joining the newsletter and sharing it over the last couple of weeks. Thank you for subscribing!

We have lots to cover in this issue. Kevin Kwok wrote a popular post on ​“Why Figma Wins” from a VC perspective that I highly recommend reading. Apple held their Worldwide Developers Conference online for the first time and presented major visual updates to both macOS and iOS. Figma community already built kits for iOS 14 UI and Widgets, and jumped on a challenge to recreate Big Sur icons. The team at Evil Martians shared tips on using Auto Layout, while a few other teams shared their experience of switching to Figma and how it compares to other tools. Enjoy!

I decided not to send a newsletter last week, as the focus was on more important topics and conversations. While that’s still the case, let’s try to get back to our regular broadcasting.

In this issue, we’ll learn how to use Constraints with Layout Grids, how to control spacing with spacer components and Auto Layout, and see how a component-based approach can be applied to an illustration system. We’ll also look at how Microsoft builds Fluent UI design system, and how Dylan Field pitched Figma to the investors in the early days. Enjoy!

In this issue, we’ll look at public projects from Figma Maker Week, talk about remote design as a new reality for many teams, learn how other designers and developers use Figma, and how design systems are organized in large teams. There is also an unusually large number of products built for Figma — iPadOS and Linux clients, a collaborative workspace for planning work, and plugin for creating and customizing illustrations. Enjoy!

P.S. Thank you to everyone who showed interest in my upcoming book ​“Designing in Figma”! After writing this newsletter for six months, I thought I know the app pretty well, but I keep discovering new features and tricks as I work on the book. Makes me appreciate a fantastic tool we have in our hands even more!

Folks, it’s a big day around here! For the last few months, I’ve been working on a book about Figma and finally ready to talk about it publicly. ​“Designing in Figma” is a complete guide to using the app and designing with reusable components and styles. It dives deep into every topic and filled with tricks that I collected while writing this newsletter. The book is coming later this summer, and it would mean a lot to me if you help spread the word and subscribe to updates.

P.S. I’m trying a new format in this issue. Instead of grouping links by source, I organized them by topic. Let me know what you think on Twitter or by replying to this email.

Six months ago, when starting this newsletter, I was worried that there might not be enough content for a fortnightly digest. Now I regularly have to pass on links to keep the newsletter’s length under control. It’s great to see how fast the community is growing and how many cool things it builds.

Since the last time, Figma released Links, Spotify wrote about their ways of working and organizing files, VMware ran a remote design sprint, the community built Stay at Home Valley, Marcin Wichary shared the process of building Selection Colors, and Blokdots came up with a way to connect Figma prototype with Arduino. If you enjoy this newsletter, please share it with your circle.

It seems like our industry is slowly adjusting to the new reality — projects are getting shipped, articles published, and plugins released. The team at Figma made a couple of small but impactful improvements to the app, including Styles support in Selection Colors. They even had a delightful April 1st update! Framer X introduced Figma importer, so now it’s easy to start designing in Figma and finish prototyping interactions in Framer X. This issue also includes remote design resources from the community, a collection of resume templates, and guide for note-taking in remote usability testing. Enjoy!