I love reading about how design decisions are being made! This story shares a few anecdotes from the designers and engineers behind the current shipment of Little Big Updates, including multi-select search, background blur in prototypes, on-canvas previews, and hanging punctuation.

If you missed the livestream (or had trouble joining the Zoom webinar), check out this recording of the event. Lively and exciting presentation by the Designer Advocates team!

The community file is my favorite way to learn about and see demos of all 32 Little Big Updates.

On Tuesday, March 28th, 2023 at 9:00 AM PT, Figma will livestream the launch of 30+ little updates ​“that will be BIG improvements to your workflow”. The video teaser mentions the preview of blend modes and on-hover previews 👀 Sign up for a free webinar by their team of designer advocates and product managers.

“You can now seamlessly copy-and-paste between your iPad and desktop. Just open a FigJam file on your iPad, and another FigJam or Figma file on your desktop at the same time. Copy something on iPad and an in-app notification on desktop will ask you if you want to paste the selection from the other device. You can copy-and-paste from desktop to iPad, too.”

Such a fun thread by designer Jakub Świadek on how the FigJam team redesigned the sticky note curl. See also another thread by Noah Finer on how it was implemented with CSS and SVG animations.

“Now you can create tables in FigJam right from the bottom tool bar. Organize information and ideas in custom-sized tables to build project plans, decision matrices, pro/​con lists, and more.” Check out a quick demo video and read the blog post on how the product team arrived at the approach, tackled multiplayer bugs, and finessed design details.

Figma always supported #RGB and #RRGGBB CSS syntaxes in color fills, but now you can also use rgb(), rgba(), hsl(), and hsla(). Pretty neat!

Paid resources are finally available on Community! The days of dealing with license keys, paying through 3rd-party websites, and importing downloaded files are over. As a customer, you can try most resources before buying, and if something went wrong easily apply for a refund.

While this release makes the whole experience much smoother for end users, it’s a huge change for Community creators — ​“there’s no dealing with payment integrations, license keys, emailing files, or even managing refunds — just set your price, publish, and start earning”. A few years ago, I was delighted to learn that some creators earn a living from selling Figma plugins and resources. This will become much more common now because of additional exposure and a lower barrier to entry. There has never been a better time to start contributing to the design community.

On the Enterprise plan, organization admins and workspace admins can now enable libraries for all files in a given workspace. On the Organizations plan, organization admins will see an updated layout for the libraries tab in the admin settings.

Minor performance update that makes animations of interactive components in prototypes much smoother and faster.

“For Organization and Enterprise customers, we improved how the members table in the admin console loads. The new experience starts rolling out today for organization admins and workspace admins. As a result of the change, the members table should load much faster for Figma instances with more than 1,000 users.”

Prototypes are now even more powerful, with new ways to upload, edit, and interact with videos. See demos at Figma’s Twitter thread and try it out in the playground. Great follow-up update to the release of videos in October!

Figma launched network access restrictions on the Enterprise plan to enhance security measures. This feature allows organization admins to prevent employees from accidentally authenticating into personal Figma accounts while on the corporate network.

Seems like support for min/​max width and height are coming to the Auto Layout! Previous leaks by Nima Owji included support for variable fonts and text baseline alignment, so the chance that this is really coming is pretty good!

“Rolling out over the next few weeks in Japan, Europe, UK, and Canada, you have the option to purchase a new self-serve Organization plan on your own in the local currency or USD. At this time, invoicing is still only available in USD on the Organization and Enterprise plans.”

On the Enterprise plan, Figma introduced external content controls so companies can keep everyone’s work inside their Figma organization and protect their ideas. When access to external content is disabled, domain users can’t collaborate in files, projects, or teams outside of their Figma organization.

Four new fonts in FigJam to convey just the right message or feeling. ​“Simple” is a new standard font for long-form text and easy scanning. ​“Bookish” is a serif font that adds a touch of formality to headers and quotes. ​“Technical” is a fixed-width font that mimics the look and feel of code. ​“Scribbled” is a script-based font that’s perfect for comments and annotations. All fonts were custom-made for FigJam by OH no Type Co and come with lots of beautiful details and juicy ligatures (have you seen the exclamation marks?!)

This is one of the FigJam brand updates that Figma has been working on since last year and just started to roll out. Make sure to check out this Twitter thread by Damien Correll, Creative Director at Figma.

The new integration lets you embed a Mixpanel preview in FigJam to bring data into your whiteboarding sessions. File previews are automatically synced with Mixpanel so the latest data changes in Mixpanel will be reflected in FigJam.

Comments now support rich text (bolding, italicizing, strikethroughs, links, and lists), and notifications are batched for all comment threads you’re not actively involved in.