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.
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!
Joel Miller, one of the product designers behind UI3 at Figma, walks us through improvements the team is making based on the user feedback: Clip Content is a checkbox again, constraints are more efficient to use, pixel values are brought back to the resize controls in Auto Layout, more actions are shown for a layer, library information added for components, frame orientation controls are back, and blend modes improved. Kudos to the team for listening to the community!
We can’t be friends if you do not react to a new Figma drop in the same way.
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.”
Day 8. Improved language support in the Tone Dial.
Day 9 brings new slick transition controls to customize the duration, easing curve, delay, etc.
Day 7 drop makes it possible to add all the slides into the deck with no need to choose right away.
Day 6 of new releases with an addition of rulers to Slides.
Multiple people noted that rulers are too detached from the content in UI3. “Scoping” rulers to frames makes common use cases easier, but I’d miss the ability to use them directly on the canvas.
A few ways to see the pixel values on Auto Layout frames by KC Oh.
Robert Bye highlights some details of the new desktop app shipped with UI3. I love the new calm tab icons!
Miggi reminds us that property labels in Figma UI can now be turned on or off.
Matt recorded his first reaction walkthrough of the new UI3 and Make Designs AI features. Regarding UI3, I’d also love an option to hide a floating toolbar and “Ready for dev” actions. (There are no developers in my personal workspace, and even at work we have Figma projects with only marketing assets that would never require development.)
Figma has several features under development that are available to users in beta. In this article, find out which beta features are available, what they are, their beta types, and how to access each one.
Whoa, finally! Can’t believe this is getting fixed a few days before Config. Add bold, italic, underline, or strikethrough font style to a portion of text with an applied style without detaching it first.
Lots of small improvements and a few bigger changes, like an unread filter and inline comment replies.
A nice little update to the Figma mobile app. I like how the app is focused on real-world “jobs to be done“ instead of shoehorning the whole Figma experience into the phone.
The move of drafts to teams caused a big enough uproar in the Figma community to warrant an explanation from Dylan Field, the CEO of Figma. Dann Petty made one of the strongest arguments against this change.
The strong feelings made me wonder about the differences in how we use Figma, and it probably comes down to handling multiple accounts and teams. I usually have two Figma accounts — one for personal projects and another tied to my work email address. Each account has its own drafts, so my personal drafts are never mixed with work. If you’re a freelancer and a part of multiple teams with a single email address, all your drafts are mixed, and separating them can feel like an invasion into your personal space. I don’t share the strong feelings on this change, but can see where Dann and others are coming from. (Pro tip: I use a separate Figma Beta app for the personal account, so I never have to switch accounts in the app.)
Typography variables can now be scoped to limit which properties they can be applied to. For example, if you scope a number variable to font size, you can only apply the variable to font size.
Also, copying and pasting an object bound to local variables will no longer populate a file with local variables unless you choose to in a tooltip.