Bersabel Tadesse, Product Manager at Figma, writes about building and releasing last week’s updates — Figma widgets, a new toolbar menu, Community improvements, and redesigned API docs.

Another cool artifact from William Wu’s work on spring animations.

Love this behind-the-scenes video of Nikolas Klein and William Wu from Figma experimenting with how fast they can set a spring animation based on a feeling.

A couple of weeks ago, Figma experienced its worst service disruption to date. This postmortem by their engineering leaders is a very transparent look at what happened and the steps they are taking to prevent it in the future: ​“The incident was caused by a bug in AWS’s ElastiCache service with Cluster Mode enabled. The bug is such that high Publish / Subscribe workloads can trigger a sudden and sustained spike in Engine CPU utilization. Due to the complex nature of this bug, we did not hit it for weeks despite having moved our Publish / Subscribe workloads to a Clustered-Mode Enabled Redis instance much earlier.”

This deep dive into the making of the feature is my favorite kind of a blog post on Figma’s blog: ​“Building spring animations took our engineering team back to the classroom — to make animations that are both natural and accurate, we borrowed principles from physics. We’re excited to share the mechanics behind the movement, and the story of how spring animations bounced their way into Figma.”

Layout FM podcast host Rafa is joined by special guests Joel and Oscar from Figma to talk about their work designing AutoLayout V4.

An interview with Thierry Blancpain, co-founder of Grilli Type, one of the font foundries that were a part of Figma’s variable fonts beta.

Apparently, there is a poem by Robert Frost in Figma’s source code.

Damien Correll, Creative Director at Figma, shares how the branding for 4th Config came together.

Ryhan talks about designing Figma’s dark mode and rebuilding their entire color system.

Figma’s Design Director Noah Levin introduces Product Designers and UX Writers who worked on new features. Great place to discover new talented people to follow!

Nannearl Brown shows what it’s like to be a UX researcher at Figma who helps other UI/UX designers work efficiently, and what you need to know to get a job like this.

An excerpt from Dylan’s talk on how it took five years from the moment they started working on Figma to the first paid customers.

Interesting thread on a path that Dylan Field took from an intern and college dropout to the CEO of the $10B company.

Wonderful post by Clara Ujiie on her journey from Figma user and client to Designer Advocate.

”Product Manager Emily Lin shares the process of bringing FigJam to life, from beta to GA.“

Great stories and reflections from Marcin Wichary on bugs in software. ​“At Figma, there are many processes and tools to deal with bugs, including recurring Quality Weeks: time dedicated to coming together within a product team, and to fixing bugs that might otherwise get forgotten by time, bugs that deserve extra investigation, and bugs that stretch the traditional definition of bugs.”

This reminded me of another great post, ​“Debugging Misadventures: Down the Rabbit Hole”, by ex-Figma engineer Jamie Wong that I shared a while ago.

“Over the past two months, we’ve rolled out a number of updates to comments in Figma. As always, insights about our users and how they design together informed these improvements. The data science team spearheaded experiments to learn how to encourage feedback and collaboration directly in the file. Here, Data Scientist Emily Jia shares the hypotheses, tests, and learnings that lead to this cross-functional, data-driven product launch.”

The swag store is officially live! Every other day I see people hunting for Figma swag on Twitter, and it tells a lot about the product if happy users are willing to buy and wear its merch. Both the website and all items are gorgeous, and all profits are being donated to charity 👏

Anthony DiSpezio with an ode to Auto Layout 👏