Figma is bringing together the design systems community on April 16 to share new features, best practices, and a peek into what’s coming next in the half-day event. ​“We’ll share more about new capabilities to make design systems more powerful and easier to adopt, as well as features to connect your system closer to code. Our product sessions will dive deep into strategies for structuring and maintaining your system.”

Considering it’s only a couple of months until Config 2024, it’s pretty clear they will put a bow on some of the features announced last year. Typographic variables, anyone?

This April Fun Day, Figma had some fun with cursors. ​“What better way to celebrate this icon of interaction than with a look back at digital eras through the decades? For one week starting this April Fun Day, you’ll be able to choose throwback cursors inspired by four aesthetics from internet history: We’re calling them 8‑bit, Y2K, Skeuomorphic, and Aero. Here, we reminisce about bygone trends and reveal how we brought these vintages back to life.”

Andrew Hogan, Head of Insights at Figma, talks to Bob Baxley, SVP of Design at ThoughtSpot, about his view on AI’s impact, why it’s so important to design tools well, and what we can learn from history and huge projects like the Apollo Mission.

Now you can use the power of AI to generate and expand mindmaps and create visual timelines in FigJam. See examples in the gallery of ready-made FigJam AI prompts.

On April 1st, Figma makes URLs shorter and easier to read. If you call Figma’s REST APIs, embed files in your websites or apps, or use these URLs in your plugin or widget, you may need to make a few tweaks to your code.

Not the acquisition we had in mind: ​“Canva, the world’s only all-in-one visual communication platform, today announced the acquisition of Affinity, the award-winning creative software suite for professional photo editing, illustration, graphic design and page layout.”

Use the scroll wheel on your mouse to zoom in and out. Right-click and drag to pan around a file.

“Over the next few weeks, we are replacing the bottom right notification button for library updates and replacing with a new library icon for faster entry to library management.”

Figma shared the Config 2024 lineup with more than 75 speakers from around the globe — it’s absolutely bonkers this year, with folks from Teenage Engineering, The Browser Company, Humane, GitHub, Perplexity, Not Boring Software, Artifact, Ableton, Cron, Linear, Work Louder, Vercel, and many many more. This year’s conference tracks will be organized in a few stages, with separate conversations hosted around design systems, development and code, quality, leadership, etc. Can’t wait!

An update to file search — now you can filter results by owner, type, or organization/​team/​project.

There were hints about split tabs for a while, and now they’re available in the beta version of the desktop app. Luis highlights some of the use cases in this thread, including keeping a prototype on the side, managing variables, iterating on designs at different zoom levels, updating local components, and many more.

Dylan Field joins Sarah and Elad at No Priors podcast to discuss what’s next for an independent Figma, how AI can augment design and speed up the iteration loop, and how Figma is expanding beyond design with products that help the entire product team’s workflow.

Multi-edit is a powerful feature with many nuances when it comes to editing a series of related mockups or updating component variants, so Miggi prepared an entire playlist of videos covering every aspect in full depth. I highly recommend setting aside 30 minutes to watch them all in order.

If you can watch only one, here Miggi compares how editing objects across multiple frames works now and how it used to work previously. He covers some of the most significant changes — scaling and rotating multiple objects, the ability to select matching layers across a series of frames (Option-Command-A or Ctrl-Alt-A), reliance on the layer name and position, editing text across multiple frames (Enter), how editing works with Auto Layout, and using sections to scope selection of matching layers.

If you learn best by doing and experimenting, try the new playground file that explains finding and selecting matching layers, resizing and aligning them to their frames, batch text editing, changing all variants at once, and more.

A big release of ​“squeaky stairs” fixes to the prototyping! First, the inline preview now shows mobile prototypes in draggable and resizable device frames. For a deep dive on this, see the article Behind the feature: Inline device frames.

Second, there are multiple improvements to the editing speed — copy and paste noodles and interactions to a different element; delete noodles and associated interactions; delete a starting point by dragging the ​“flow label” outside of the frame; disable all shortcuts on a prototype; enable multiple ​“After Delay” events on every node; use the ​“Change to” interaction on a nested variant; auto-exit the Scale tool when switching to the Prototype tab; copy a link to the selected flow; resize the inline preview to the actual size of the prototype, and auto-focus on the input when creating a new flow.

Third, improvements to prototyping with variables — when copying and pasting an element with a local variable bound to it, Figma will create a new collection with the copied variable; overlays now inherit the mode of the frame linking to them; negative numbers support in the expression builder; support for ! or not in a boolean conditional check (yay!), and string values ​“true” or ​“false” can be bound to instance visibility in addition to booleans. Prototyping performance has also improved, cutting down loading spinners by 22%.

Finally, the width and height values can now be set to zero, so we don’t need to rely on the 0.001 hack anymore! For a nice roundup of the above improvements, see threads by prototyping PM Garrett Miller and designer Niko Klein.

Creating beautiful gradients in Figma just got easier! New controls for flipping and rotating gradients (see why they’re separate controls), displaying the gradient stop position in percentage (another yay from me!), and even better-looking defaults (although they’re bringing back the old behavior if you add a gradient on top of another fill).

A few updates to granting or managing access to teams and projects (currently being rolled out). These include improved UI for the teams and projects share dialog, roles for team members on a project, and audience setting on teams and users will have the ability to directly control the audience setting on projects.

What an incredible introduction to color spaces! It starts by stating an important point that ​“color spaces are all constructs”, then proceeds to explain how useful one particular color space from 1931 is: ​“CIE XYZ turns color mixing problems and color matching problems into math problems. This has proven so useful that every modern color space is defined in terms of CIE XYZ. When we say that a system is ​“color managed” what we’re saying is: it’s built on top of CIE XYZ.”

Later it covers my favorite topic of perceptual uniformity and explains why it’s so hard to achieve — communicating meaning in data visualization, storing colors digitally, measuring contrast to ensure accessibility, and rendering even-looking gradients are all highly desirable use cases. Both CIE XYZ and sRGB can’t do it: ​“sRGB, the web’s dominant, default color space, was constructed in order to model a typical 1990s cathode-ray tube display.” On the first attempt to create a perceptually uniform space: ​“Whereas every color theorist before Albert Munsell (and many, after him) worked from the ​“frame in”, trying to cram all visible colors into a regular shape like a wheel or a sphere or whatever, Munsell instead worked from the ​“content out”, trying to create even intervals between adjacent colors and letting each ​“branch” extend as far as it could before he reached some limit of saturation. The resulting solid resembles a lumpy, lopsided spinning top.”

In the end, he explains why and how the Oklab color space proposed by Björn Ottosson in 2020 became rapidly adopted by the web platform and tools. (Not all tools yet — wink-wink!) Lab parameters in ​“a” and ​“b” are hard to work with, so OKLCH offers a user-friendly way to navigate the color space through Lightness, Hue, and Chroma. That’s the color space I rely on the most in my work.

Designer Advocate Lauren Andres shares tips on how to streamline handoff when it’s a constant stream of WIP designs, communication, and collaboration. Her advice involves using annotations in Dev Mode, adopting a shared language, organizing your files with sections and ​“Ready for dev” statuses, archiving old designs, and leaning on components.

Webflow announced Design System Sync, a more seamless integration between Figma and Webflow powered by the new companion Webflow App for the Figma to Webflow plugin. The new app allows instant synchronization of design components and variables: ​“This means that any change made in Figma can be directly reflected in Webflow, eliminating the need for manual updates and ensuring that the final website is always in sync with the latest designs.”

Anthony DiSpezio shows how merge reviews now ignore top-level sections, allowing you to review changes at the frame or component level.

Designer Advocate Chad Bergman explains the basics of design systems — what they are, how they work, and how they can change the way you design.

The Stark team prepared simplified and actionable explanations of WCAG 2.2 criteria. ​“This is a collection of summaries of each and every criteria from the WCAG 2.2 designed for clarity, simplicity, and actionability. The WCAG is complex and detailed so we wanted to give you something that takes the awesome efforts that went into creating it and gives it to you in a really easy to understand package.”

“Some Figma features require users to upload or retrieve content from our servers (e.g. publishing a library, adding media to comments), but customers might have strict firewall settings that block these actions. Searching for ​“Check network settings” in quick actions will open a network settings modal, which indicates whether any of these services are blocked. IT admins can update their firewall’s allowlist to restore access. This modal is also accessible via a visual bell if users run into errors trying to use features blocked by their firewall settings.”

The new Figma for Jira app is now generally available, with a couple of new features — searching for linked Figma designs in Jira issues using Jira Query Language, and creating design automations in Jira to notify you of changes to designs, transition issue statuses, and easily add labels to issues with designs.

I keep seeing complaints about the removal of code generation from the free view-only mode, and want to point out this section of the ​“Dev Mode is out of beta: what admins need to know” article. CSS, iOS, and Android codegen is still available but now is in the copy/​paste menu when you right-click a layer and choose ​“Copy as code”. For an overview of the other collaboration features available on the free plan, see Use the right sidebar with view-only access help article.

(Archive link without a Bloomberg paywall.) RIP Adobe XD. The writing was on the wall even back in 2022, but now I wonder if Adobe will just leave a big gap in a cohesive offering of the Creative Suite? Lively discussion at Hacker News.

“When it agreed to buy Figma, which helps users design app and website interfaces, Adobe put its competing program XD in ​“maintenance mode,” ceasing to launch new features or sell it individually. The deal to purchase Figma fell apart under regulatory pressure in December and the creative software giant hadn’t announced whether it would resurrect XD or attempt to build another competitor. ​“We have no plans to further invest in it,” a spokesperson said Tuesday of XD.”

Dev Mode moved out of beta last week, and in this article, the Figma team talks about their product philosophy, how they’re improving the experience for developers and designers, and what’s coming next. There are new features that bring design and code closer together, including annotations in Dev Mode, along with improvements to compare changes, plugins, and the Figma for VS Code extension.

How it started: ​“We needed a team that lived and breathed development like we did design, so in 2021, we acquired Visly — a team of eight designers and engineers who built a tool for developing UI components in React. […] The Visly team brought with them years of hands-on experience and months of research on developer tooling — in other words, they had the developer ​“intuition” we were looking for.”

How it’s going: ​“Dev Mode aims to make you more productive by connecting the tools you use and your code components to the design file. There’s no one way to work, which is why we built Dev Mode to adapt to a variety of tools, processes, and workflows. Whether you’re looking to link design and code with Storybook, ensure accessibility with Stark, or streamline project management with Jira, Linear, and GitHub, plugins allow you to extend Figma’s functionality to flex however your team works.”

Always love deep dives from people behind the features! Product Designer Oscar Nilsson explains how Annotations came to be — for both design and development. On why annotations are in the Dev Mode: ​“We wanted one dedicated space to curate a spec for developers and call out necessary details or areas of confusion, so we ultimately decided that designers should go to Dev Mode to annotate. In doing so, designers would see exactly what their developer counterpart sees while annotating, and they could share a link to Dev Mode when they’re done. Our goal is not for Dev Mode to silo developers once a designer’s work is done — but to engage the broader team in the product development process, with annotations being a first, crucial step.”

On positioning in context: ​“Testing and iterating on our positioning logic became an adventure on its own. We explored a direction in which annotations hide until you click on a corresponding frame. That felt right in theory, but once we actually tried it, we realized that it was still easy to miss out on important annotations if you were just looking at a frame without actively selecting it. We then iterated on different versions of automatically expanding annotations based on zoom level and position, and it immediately felt more intuitive.”