“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.

SVG exports will now correctly render background blur and both angular and diamond gradients.

Miggi explains and shows the new export options in action.

When exporting a raster image (JPG, PNG, PDF), now you can choose an image resampling option. Image resampling helps maintain the quality of your exports by determining the color of each pixel. It’s useful when exporting images to different sizes or a vector design to a raster format.

The Detailed option (default) uses an image resampling method called ​“bicubic sampling.” This method looks at each pixel and uses a weighted average of at least four surrounding pixels from the original image for export. Best used when optimizing for detail in exports, such as high-quality images, vector art, and assets with gradients or drop shadows.

The Basic option uses an image resampling method known as ​“nearest neighbor sampling.” This method looks at pixels from the original image and finds the closest matching pixel to use for the export. Best used when optimizing for hard lines in assets or for assets that don’t need finer details, like icons, low-resolution images, and pixel art.

A new sidebar provides a large collection of diagramming shapes for engineers, along with quick access to recently used ones. Stroke color is now independent of fill color for shapes and sections, and connector labels are movable. Additionally, there is an updated color palette with more variety and consistency.

“You can now lock the aspect ratio of almost any object in Figma – including frames, shapes, images, videos, vectors, and text – so that the proportions of that object are respected as you scale the object or its parent container. This functionality replaces Constrain proportions, which only worked when you adjusted the width or height fields of an object in the properties panel.”

To see it in action, watch video explainers by Miggi and Christine Vallaure. Miggi shows how to temporarily unlock the aspect ratio by holding down the Ctrl key, while Christine points out the correct CSS syntax for implementation.

Two new AI features — quickly search through top Community files to find assets you need and increase the resolution and clarity of your images in just one click in the editor.

Dev Mode users can now see variables used in gradients. Binding variables to gradients was also added to the plugin API so plugin developers can offer variables support out-of-the-box.