Annotations are now available in Design Mode with new color-coded categories. Love that categories are fully editable, so you can adjust them to your team’s workflow.

This one is a big ​“finally” for me! BRB, I have some library cleanup to do.

Freshly baked goodies: FigPals for April Fun Week (extended until April 11); a button for collapsing layers — love that it excludes the layer tree of your selection; quality-of-life improvements to corner radius inputs and flyouts for effects, fills, and layout grids; reordering variables modes and collections; annotations in Design Mode; accessibility contrast in color picker; and finally, an eyedropper added to Dev Mode.

“On April 30, we’ll be fully transitioning to UI3, our redesigned interface that puts your work center stage. Here’s what you need to know about the change, along with tips for a smooth transition.”

“Figma is localizing for the Spanish market. This includes full product translation, culturally adapted user interfaces, and dedicated support for Spanish language users. Figma plans to expand product localization to additional languages throughout the year, as it continues to invest in its global community.” (Coincidently, I was in Spain when this was announced. Rest assured I didn’t touch Figma while vacationing with my family.)

A few tweaks and improvements to the file browser create a more consistent experience.

See if color contrast meets accessibility standards right within the color picker. I’m glad this is now built-in and the UI looks great (see an X thread from Billy Sweeney), but as a color nerd and creator of Accessible Palette, I wish Figma went a step further and supported APCA. I wrote about issues with the WCAG 2 back in 2021 (see the last section), and Arthur Objartel made a strong case for supporting it as well.

“Figma now transforms common character combinations into smart symbols in all fonts. Now when you type the following characters – ©, ®, ™, ->, <-, vv, ^^, \[ \] – Figma will automatically transform them into smart symbols: ©️, ®️, ™️, →, ← , ↓, ↑, ▢. This will occur with every font, as long as you have the ​“Use smart quotes/​symbols” preference on. Also available in FigJam and Slides.”

Last Tuesday, Figma rolled out the new pricing, which was announced in December. The design seats price increased, while Dev Mode seats remained unchanged and all paid seats now include FigJam and Slides. Admins got upfront approval over seat upgrades.

Nice built-in support for code blocks with syntax highlighting in Slides.

Figma shared new details about connected projects that will launch in the first half of 2025. They let two separate teams or organizations — like an agency and a client — collaborate on a shared project using billable seats from their plans without paying for extra seats. Pro users can connect up to 3 projects, Organization 6 and Enterprise 15. The plan of the team initiating a connected project determines features available to all users collaborating on the project. Resources like shared libraries and fonts can be enabled for everyone.

“We’ve made the scrubbable area to the left of input fields larger to make it easier to start scrubbing. We also fixed a bug that inadvertently made 1 pixel scrubbable on the right side of an input field. Rolling out over the next few days, you’ll only be able to initiate scrubbing from the left side of an input field.”

Keyboard shortcuts were finally added to boolean operations! Press ⌥⬆ (Mac) or Alt+⬆ (PC) with U to unify your selection, S to subtract, I to intersect, E to exclude, and F to flatten. The ⌘E still works for Flatten!

“See when teammates and invited guests last visited your Figma files, helping you track engagement and keep projects moving forward.”

Plugins are now available in Figma Slides, and three dozen plugins have already been updated to support it.

Product Marketer Sarah Kelly and Designer Advocate Kaitie Chambers share all the recent launches and introduce a few brand-new features. The Figma team also gives hands-on demos on how to use the new features in your workflow immediately.

The Billing section in Admin settings is now organized into an Overview tab with a high-level summary of your plan and everything you’re paying for, as well as an Invoice tab with all your past payments. On the Enterprise plan, a new tab for billing groups enables admins to drill in and navigate to a specific billing group page.

Kinda wild how big of a deal last week’s Aspect Ratio release has become. While it’s one of the ​“finally!” releases, it’s also a good reminder that many features considered essential by product teams might actually wait quite a while. The Technology Brothers podcast covered the design community’s reaction and followed up with a discussion about Figma’s position in the market.

Chad from Figma explains how Library Analytics in Figma Organization and Enterprise enables you to gain insights into library usage trends and drill into component, style, and variable usage.

Org and Enterprise customers can now find styles and variables data in their analytics reporting within Figma. This is in addition to the existing component data for a given library. Library Analytics API is out of beta and includes styles and variables data as well, but it’s only available to Enterprise customers.