If you’re on the Enterprise plan, workspace members can now pin files to the top of their workspaces. ​“Pinned files help users designate important, shared content so that workspace members can get started with the right resources.”

In-person attendees of Config 2024 received Issue 2 of The Prompt, a print magazine by Figma’s Story Studio and Brand Studio. A digital version is now available on the blog. ​“Featuring leaders working across design, engineering, product development, and the built environment, this collection of essays and interviews takes on questions about how AI might shape the way we create.”

Explaining systems thinking applied to design systems through an off-road vehicle platform? That’s my jam. ​“Nissan has developed a vehicle platform that gives it flexibility across a wide selection of vehicles. They leverage the same base component (the frame), and attached different components to that base in order to achieve the desired design. When building a design system, we should strive for a similar level of structure and flexibility. This gives us consistency while also allowing us to be adaptive and scale to our user’s needs.”

Rauno from Vercel wrote a fantastic article with over 20 visual examples of using depth for design, animation, and interaction.

On September 20th, the Portugal chapter of Friends of Figma organizes a free full-day hybrid conference for the community by the community. ​“Expect talks and workshops on the Future of Design, DesignOPS, Design Systems, Creativity and, as always, a lot of amazing Figma tips as tricks.” All talks will be streamed, but I wish I could attend the in-person event in Lisbon!

Speaking of design conferences, the GitHub Design team recently held its second internal design conference, LGTM. You can watch talks from last year in the YouTube playlist, but a couple of this year’s talks have already been published as well — ​“Who is the We in the How Might We” on building trust and ​“Async/​Await” on close collaboration across non-overlapping time zones.

The new Figma homepage, this time designed with a custom Figma Sans typeface. (I truly hope this redesign was codenamed ​“Figma sans Whyte” internally.)

I got curious about how the Figma brand and messaging changed over the years and went down the rabbit hole of the Wayback Machine. The first available version is from December 2015 — ​“The Collaborative Interface Design Tool.” A year later, it was changed to ​“The first interface design tool with real-time collaboration,” which feels like something Rasmus Andersson would design. It was updated to the ​“Turn Ideas into Products Faster” in April 2017, which was slightly tweaked later that year. The homepage was redesigned again in January 2019 to ​“A better way to design.”

Finally, one of my favorite versions using ABC Whyte typeface and ​“Where teams design together” tagline was launched in October of 2019 and stayed pretty much unchanged until April of 2021 when it was replaced with a mouthful ​“Minds meeting minds is how great ideas meet the world.” This one didn’t stay for too long and gave way to a great tagline, ​“Nothing great is made alone,” in July 2021, which was used for two years until July of 2023, when it was replaced with a more descriptive ​“How you design, align, and build matters. Do it together with Figma.” That was the version that the new homepage replaced.

If you’ve already caught up with the Config videos, here is a new YouTube playlist with recordings from the Config APAC, which happened the following week after the main Config in San Francisco.

Minimize or hide the new UI to regain more screen real estate as you work.

Ridd noticed that designers who can code spend more time sketching their ideas and less time in Figma. This approach isn’t common because it still takes too long to code designs, but AI will change that. What if instead of generating polished mockups from text prompts we used AI to turn wireframes into frontend code, applied our design system, and tweaked the visual direction based on the provided mood board? (This is just one of the ideas explored in the new section of Dive.) 

A free, branded link shortener for your Figma portfolios or design files with a fig.page domain and powerful analytics.

A retrospective on an issue with Make Designs from Noah Levin, a VP of Design at Figma. First, a reminder on how the feature works: “[…] Make Designs feature employs three parts: a model, some context, and a prompt. This feature currently uses a collection of off-the-shelf models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Amazon’s Titan model—the same generally available models that anyone can use—and we have not done any additional training or fine-tuning. To give the model enough freedom to compose designs from a wide variety of domains, we commissioned two extensive design systems (one for mobile and one for desktop) with hundreds of components, as well as examples of different ways these components can be assembled to guide the output.”

What went wrong: ​“We carefully reviewed the underlying design systems throughout the course of development and during a private beta. But in the week leading up to Config, new components and example screens were added that we simply didn’t vet carefully enough. A few of those assets were similar to aspects of real world applications, and appeared in the output of the feature with certain prompts.”

In this episode of Dive recorded at Config, Ridd talks to Figma design engineer Vincent van der Meulen about how the new Visual Search feature was born from a mid-project pivot. Don’t miss Vincent’s original pitch video for visual search in Figma.

Mia Blume from Designing with AI with a controversial take: ​“In fact, I think Figma AI changes nothing for design. […] Besides the immediately useful feature of smart naming, Figma AI doesn’t alter the existing trajectory. This isn’t a dig on Figma, or its role in the future of tooling. It’s more that as a discipline, we were already ​“here”—some people just didn’t realize it.” If you’ve been paying attention to AI-related links in this newsletter, you would agree with her points.

Bingo: ​“The real weakness that jeopardizes our field has existed long before the invention of generative AI tools for creatives. If our value (even if it’s only perceived) lies solely in drawing boxes, then we will inevitably become obsolete. And if we remain focused on the wrong things, we will miss the moment in which we could do something about it.” In the end, she suggests three key areas that design leaders can focus on.

Abdus Salam, Product Designer at Meta, writes at UX Collective: ​“The future belongs to designers who can master AI, not be mastered by it. Our value lies not just in our technical skills, but in our creativity, our empathy, and our ability to wield these tools in service of crafting experiences that resonate on a profoundly human level.” Also: ​“while AI can help us reach ​“good”, achieving ​“great” still requires human ingenuity and an unwavering commitment to quality.”

Ridd shows his advanced Raycast setup. One thing I adopted immediately is the Figma File Search extension he recommended — what a wonderful time-saver! The Color Picker and Ruler extensions might replace some of the third-party tools I’ve been relying on as well. 

David Hoang on three topics he is thinking a lot about after this year’s Config.

Last Monday, Andy Allen from Not Boring Software asked Figma AI to design a ​“not boring weather app.” The generated result was almost a copy of Apple’s Weather app on iOS, even when using a different prompt. CTO of Figma Kris Rasmussen commented that they’re investigating and clarified that ​“there was no training as part of this feature or any of our generative features,” so the similarities are a function of the 3rd-party models and commissioned design systems.

33% faster file loading and 33% fewer memory issues! ​“To ensure even the largest Figma design files can be used as efficiently as possible, Figma dynamically loads pages. When a file is opened, only the page that you land on is loaded (usually the first page in a file). This means a file with hundreds of pages can open as quickly as a file with just a few! Figma loads additional pages as you navigate to them. If an unloaded page is particularly complex, you may experience a brief pause when you navigate to the page.” Certain actions like searching across all pages, reviewing updates, or running a plugin or widget that needs the whole file may cause the file to load all pages.

Huge performance boost. See this Twitter thread from Bersabel Tadesse, Director of Product at Figma, on the journey to shipping this release: ​“Our architecture was built around files being the atomic unit of work, but users were treating pages as their atomic unit of work. So it didn’t make sense to keep optimizing within the current architecture—or worse, try and change how our users work.”

Throughout May, drafts are being moved into teams on the Starter and Professional plans. This change was poorly communicated and caused a public outcry, but I don’t actually think it’s unfair or a big deal. Historically, drafts haven’t been associated with a team. This made work ownership unclear, and teams couldn’t use advanced paid features like Dev Mode while working on drafts. Moving forward, drafts will be associated with a team, and existing files will need to be moved. Drafts stay private and can be shared view-only for free, but users will need paid seats to share drafts with others and to edit other teammates’ drafts. The free plan still includes 3 collaborative design files. This change puts a limit on teams collaborating in drafts but feels more like closing a loophole than a dark pattern.

Changes to sharing and access settings ​“to create a more consistent sharing experience and give you clearer visibility into and control over content permissions,” being released through mid-June. New team access terminology, clarified UI for inheriting project access by the team members and child file access by the project members, a dedicated prototype share dialog, a branch’s audience and role, and a central place for sharing other forms, views, and artifacts of the file. (Pre-Config cleanup for something new?)