The AI feature Make Designs is back under a new name, First Draft, which I greatly prefer as it sets more accurate expectations. (Curiously, that was the original internal project name.) ​“We’re also introducing some key updates, like letting you choose from one of four libraries depending on your needs — whether it’s a wireframing library to help you sketch out less opinionated, lo-fi primitives, or higher-fidelity libraries to provide more visual expressions or patterns to explore.”

I believe that wasn’t previously shared: ​“Our vision is for First Draft to extend beyond our current libraries and allow organizations to incorporate their own custom libraries. In the future, teams will be able to draft ideas using their company’s unique design language without having to sift through hundreds of components by hand.”

Describing design details with plain text is a nice way to communicate the intent to developers.

You can now rename files in the desktop app by double-clicking the tab name.

A deep dive into Figma’s brand refresh. ​“Figma’s visual identity has gotten a bold refresh. From playful primitives to a vibrant new palette, we’re unveiling our latest brand evolution — one that speaks to all product builders.” 

I love how Figma showcased the community work on a giant screen at Times Square.

Olivia Hingley for It’s Nice That: ​“Sitting at the core of the concept is a new brand idea: ​‘build by design’. Short and sweet, the idea reinstates that design is more than just a skill, department or process, it’s the ​“gravitational centre” of the brand. Three brand beliefs come from this idea: ​‘design is everyone’s business’, which speaks to the flexibility and broad nature of design, while the second, ​‘craft as a differentiator’, centers on the care and attention to detail that Figma propagates. […] And, the third and final belief is ​‘the idea is just the beginning’.”

“We’ve added a new export quality setting to give you more control over the file size and quality of images when exporting frames and images from Figma as JPEGs or PDFs. A new quality dropdown in Advanced export settings allows you to choose from High, Medium, or Low quality when exporting as a JPEG or PDF. Low quality will compress your images the most, resulting in the smallest file size, and High quality won’t compress images at all. If you do not select a quality setting upon export, there will be no change to how your files are exported; Figma will follow existing default settings (Medium quality for PDFs and High quality for JPEGs). Also available in FigJam.”

Nathan Curtis: ​“In 2015, I established three models of forming teams for scaling design systems: solitary, central, and federated. The article progressed through each, scoffing at solitary, considering central, and favoring federated based on the section’s positioning and proportional length. […] In this article, I’ll dig into how federated is not a choice, it’s a facet. In practice, it’s never pursued first and never without central investment. In most cases, it’s optional and its outcomes can be so expensive and frustrating that it’s not worth it. Even worse, positioning federated as a primary objective anchors so many stakeholder myths to unwind that it damages system potential and even threatens its existence.”

“Show Them” is a new course on landing page optimization by Rob Hope. He hosts one of my favorite design podcasts and curates an inspirational collection of single-page websites at One Page Love. Rob spent years analyzing landing pages, so when he shares knowledge, I’m listening! To see what his content is like, check out the bonus video on Social Proof.

The course is launching on November 19th and offers a generous 70% discount until September 18th, which I immediately took advantage of. (Not affiliated, just love Rob’s work.)

Delighted to see the internal name sneaking into a shortcut for creating a new Slides deck! BTW, both figjam.new and figma.new have also been around for a while. 

Constraints and a blend mode now display inline when toggled on, or the default is changed.

Figma just added 450 new Google Fonts to the app. Select ​“Google Fonts (8÷24 update)” from the font picker dropdown to access them.

So much polish has been added to FigJam in the last few weeks! Now, you can change the color of connectors and their text independently.

Users in Enterprise organizations with workspaces set up can now publish libraries to a workspace in addition to a team or the whole org.

My friend Helena Zhang designed a new monospaced pixel font and licensed it under the SIL Open Font License. It’s beautiful and nostalgic, bringing back so many memories from the early days of the web. The website is a lovely mix of retro vibes and a modern feel.

At Config, Figma shared a roadmap to make Figma work better for freelancers and agencies. Last week, they launched the first step towards this commitment. Now, you can transfer work to your clients on Pro plans. In the process, you can keep a copy of the work for yourself, and clients can remove collaborators when accepting a transfer to avoid accidental upgrades.

Small improvements to FigJam keep coming — now connectors can connect to the edge or arbitrary spots on an object, not just the NSEW cardinal directions.

Molly Hellmuth shares daily discoveries while working on the UI Prep design system update. There are great tips on pairing heading and body sizes, clearly marking a default text size, avoiding hiding components with a period or underline in the name, scoping variables in bulk, establishing a set of ​“surface” colors, removing a focused state, and including a special data text style for tables.

Quality-of-life improvement in FigJam — regardless of connector and shape styling, they will always have the same optical spacing. Also, alignment indicators now appear only when needed and are hidden when the object is being moved across the board. So much cleaner!

Happy birthday to my favorite design tool!

Christopher Butler wrote an essay on how details, focus, time, and taste elevate craft. ​“Attention to detail is not a personality trait; it is a manifestation of a preference for order and consistency. When that preference is fundamental, it makes it nearly impossible for a person to not see mistakes, flaws, inconsistencies, or differences. […] This is why attention to detail cannot (easily) be taught. Teaching a person to ​“see detail” requires them to care about and prefer certain forms of order.”

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.