On Enterprise plans, workspace and team admins now can set default modes for a variable collection. This allows new files to open with the default variables modes set by the admin.

Harry McCracken published a big story about Figma and Dylan Field at Fast Company. It talks about Adobe’s acquisition and what it could mean for both companies, the future of design in the era of AI, the origin story of Figma, and their big ambition to ​“make creativity the new productivity”. 

The new page from Figma nicely explains different ways to build a color scheme (see also the book ​“Interaction of Color” by Josef Albers) but falls flat when it comes to color models and contrast — I wish this discussion didn’t stop at physics and involved human perception and modern tools. The generator also exists as a plugin, and that’s where it comes handy.

Updated corner radius UI makes it easier to bind a variable to each individual corner.

“Org Admins on the Enterprise plan can set a public link sharing policy for Design and FigJam files at the workspace level. This allows customers to have different policies for different workspaces, thereby unlocking user testing and external collaboration in some areas of the business without sacrificing security in other areas.”

Figma collaborated with Adobe on a video exploring some of the ideas for the post-acquisition future — Firefly in FigJam and Figma, linked assets between Figma and Creative Suit, multiplayer in Adobe apps, Figma prototypes + After Effects, shared design systems, and more. For more ideas, see threads from Noah Levin, Tom Lowry, Sho Kuwamoto, and Luis.

I’m a generalist and occasionally do different kinds of design work, so having a tighter integration between Figma and Adobe apps would be pretty neat. Adobe Fonts would be my #1, but I wish I could reuse a color palette and assets from Figma while working on my book layout in InDesign. While designing a photo-heavy website, I went back and forth between Figma and Lightroom experimenting with post-processing. The new Photoshop on the web also makes so much sense as a native integration. Count me in as a Figma × Adobe optimist.

Admins in Enterprise organizations can now make workspaces feel distinct with customized icons, header colors, and descriptions.

Karri Saarinen shares how their team is building one of the best-designed products out there: ​“The main point is that the design is only a reference, never any kind of deliverable itself, so the way it’s constructed doesn’t really matter.“ Don’t miss a follow-up on this approach and tech debt, as well as an older thread on their simple design system. Last but not least, his recent interview with Lenny Rachitsky on how Linear builds product was just fantastic (a good chunk is behind a paywall, but a podcast version is free.)

Great thread explaining the ​“weirdness” of OkLCH by one of the authors of the new Harmony color palette. Here is something I never thought about: ​“In electronic displays, yellow, cyan, and magenta are products of shining two lamps – subpixels. The more light is emitted, the brighter we perceive the color. It means the max lightness of the yellow is much higher than the blue’s.”

In August, Figma rolled out the ability for users to rate and review community resources. Social features are tricky, and many plugin developers (including myself) felt discouraged by the unexpected side effect of receiving one-star ratings without any comments or feedback. Figma is listening and iterating, and this week will be rolling out more changes — ratings are gone and ​“likes” are being brought back as a way for users to tell that they’re enjoying a resource. Users will still be able to leave comments to share their feedback and authors could directly reply to them. Great to see this level of care and involvement with the community!

A new setting for more control over billing in Figma — admins can set the default role for anyone joining their Figma account to be editor, viewer, or viewer-restricted.

In addition to setting the default role, admins can get email notifications to keep track of who has upgraded and what action led to their upgrade.

New ways to manipulate colors and glyphs in Figma, coming directly from the team. #18: Two new blend modes that are most applicable to designing for iOS, as explained by Rogie — plus darker (linear burn) and plus lighter (linear dodge). Now we can do a classic dodge and burn! #19: Scrubbable inputs in color pickers. Use your mouse to drag or ​“scrub” individual fields to get precise control over your colors. #20: Alpha values in color inputs will be applied to the color’s opacity. #21: When outlining a stroke within a text node, the text is now converted into a group of vector nodes, one per text glyph.

New in-product workflows for requesting and approving plugins and widgets within Figma on the Organization and Enterprise plans. 

New frame presets and device frames for iPhone 15, 15 Plus, 15 Pro, and 15 Pro Max. Moreover, Keeyen created vector iPhones for prototyping and shared them with the community.

A few small tweaks to the visual experience of designing in Figma. #14: Whoa, now you can see both horizontal and vertical offset when hovering over objects while holding Option! (Used to be only one or another.) #15: Click targets are no longer jumping around when removing effects. (This one was pretty hilarious, but not in a good way.) #16: New red indicator lines show when you’ve reached min and max widths — even when typing or resizing paddings. #17: Arrow ligatures now work in section and frame titles. (FWIW I have a better solution!)

Dylan Field, founder and CEO of Figma, looks at the relationship between designers, developers, and AI, in conversation with a16z’s David George. In the process, he also demoes Jambot, their new AI widget for FigJam. Love this quote from Dylan: ​“It [AI] will lower the floor for who’s able to participate in the design process, but also raise the ceiling of what you can actually do.”

Jake Albaugh and Emil Sjölander discuss using AI-based code generation (codegen) tools for augmenting your design to development process, not automating it. ​“Codegen isn’t just an automated, hands-off replacement for translating design to code; it’s best as an augmentation for you to more quickly understand design changes, and to keep your team in sync.”

A cool bunch of improvements to Figma this week! #10: Select and copy items on the canvas while viewing version history. #11: Copy the URL of a file via Quick Actions. #12: When pasting links over existing selected text, you can now paste and match style so the text you’ve selected will be replaced by the URL or email address you want to paste in, rather than auto-link-ifying the selected text. #13: Exporting objects with a multiplier applied no longer occasionally adds an extra pixel to width and/​or height.

You can now collaborate on Figma and FigJam files directly in Google Meet.

Alright, as an author of this newsletter, I feel personally attacked! (Just kidding, I’m not.) In my opinion, it all comes down to the eternal debate about the role of ​“hard skills” vs. ​“soft skills”. You can’t get far without either. ​“Perfecting every Figma plugin” wouldn’t advance your career, but being efficient with time, solving problems that others couldn’t, or making something unique with these plugins might. On another hand, we’ve all seen portfolios with detailed case studies, processes, wireframes, and diagrams where the end result… is just meh.

All of the competencies in Artiom’s pyramid matter, but it’s noteworthy that tools, visual design, and UX design are at the foundation. Considering that this foundation is always in flux and evolving, it’s no surprise that the design community is paying so much attention.

Week 2 of the Little Big Updates is all about collaborating more creatively. #5: Embedding MP4 and MOV video files directly in FigJam. #6: A new look for the embedded content in FigJam. #7: Camera selection and better audio/​video effects in the Photo Booth widget. #8: 300+ new emojis in the emoji picker after upgrading to Unicode 14.0. #9: When you stop following a spotlight in a Figma or FigJam file, a new reminder will appear prompting you to rejoin your teammates while the spotlight is still active.

Two new articles in the UX Collective from Christine Vallaure, who graciously shared free ​“friend links” with Figmalion readers. The first one explores a new approach to creating responsive designs with variables and modes, whereby components automatically adapt to the screen size they are placed on and only resize within the provided breakpoints. In this case, variables automate which component gets displayed and set stops at certain minimum and maximum points to stay inside your breakpoint range. I had no idea that string variables can be used to select a variant of the component 🤯

The second guide introduces the concept of ​“container queries”, which are slowly gaining adoption in CSS and will fundamentally change the way we approach responsive design. Christine compares the current approach of using media query breakpoints with container queries and investigates how to imitate them with the current Figma features.

A new take on Little Big Updates from Figma — every Thursday this fall they’re releasing some of the 30+ updates designed to make day-to-day life a little easier. This week it’s four improvements to the Assets panel. #1 is filtering assets by a specific library file, recently viewed, default libraries, and more. #2 is larger and more visible thumbnails. #3 is showing component names by default, with variant counts on hover. #4 is my favorite — clicking on an asset opens up a new component modal that displays a larger preview and a link to the main component file, plus a component playground on the paid plans where you can preview and interact with any variants, variable modes, or component properties.

In Recovery Mode, you temporarily regain access to the file and can take limited actions to reduce content and restore edit access. Once you have reduced file memory below 90%, you can exit recovery mode and regain full edit access to your file.

Bjango, the maker of the popular apps iStat Menus and Snowflake, tests how various design tools utilize memory, what’s their baseline usage with no documents open, and how memory grows with lots of large documents open. Not surprisingly, Figma has the highest memory usage as an Electron app. ​“I believe Figma loads a full copy of the application per tab, which may be part of the cause for its high memory usage. Each tab is also limited to 2GB of RAM, leaving around 1.75 GB for the largest possible document. Put another way, if you purchased a Mac Studio with 192 GB of RAM, you could only open documents that use less than 1% of it. This is different from the other applications tested, which have access to the Mac Studio’s full 192 GB, minus whatever the system is using. Figma simultaneously uses the most overall memory of all the tools tested, while also being the most constrained.”

Behind-the-scenes story on how Figma scaled their performance testing system from a single laptop running in the office to a dream setup built for scale: ​“After considering a few different approaches, we ultimately decided to ship two systems: A cloud-based system would handle mass testing, covering our bases for the majority of situations, and a hardware system would be highly targeted, tackling situations that required more precision. They would be connected by the same CI system, and engineers across product teams would run the same suite of performance test scenarios across them.”

“Design Manager Juli Sombat sheds light on how a need for more cohesion led Spotify’s design systems team to take a cross-platform approach to components.”

“The problem with Figma plugins is that the market is really not that big. If you look closely on the Figma marketplace, you can probably tell pretty fast there are relatively few plugins making money. There are some UI kits listed where, if you divide the views/​uses between 100 to get a sense of the revenue, you end up with something like €20-€400 which is frankly not worth the effort.”

I don’t think that’s necessarily true, and know that some creators make significantly more. That said, I wish it was easier to guesstimate the market size for the idea on the Figma marketplace. I love how Etsy shows the number of sales in every shop, and in combination with the number of ratings, it can give a rough estimate of the item’s success.