Charli Marie with ten tips on how you can get the most out of FigJam.

Luis Ouriach made a starter kit for documenting your components and tokens on the Figma canvas. “With this method, we take a set of core styles (primitive tokens), and then “alias” them into tokens specific to components. It’s worth noting that aliasing is not technically happening, we are using the hyperlink feature within Figma to link from our semantic, component tokens back to the primitive styles within the same file.” Love seeing a Designer Advocate publishing a token starter kit a few weeks before Config 👀

Bruno Figueiredo, a Community Advocate for Figma in Portugal, came up with a fun community project — “lets all record our journeys from all across the globe heading into San Francisco. It doesn’t need to be perfect or look cinematic. Just grab your phone or camera and record the fun moments, the packing, the ride to the airport or the flight, the registration… all the little bits up until the moment the conference is about to start.” Can’t wait to see the end result!

A guest post in Lenny Rachitsky’s newsletter by Figma VP of Product Sho Kuwamoto on the importance of feel, service, and staying close to customers. “Fast-forward to 2023, and Figma has grown beyond what I could have imagined. It’s gotten to the point where people often ask me for advice on how to prioritize features or how to run a product process. These questions are hard for me to answer, because I don’t think we do anything special. Our process is messy and we make mistakes. We create designs and then throw them away. We miscommunicate all the time and forget to write things down.”

Jan Toman gathered the best practices for creating solid button components.

State management is now standardized for prototypes using interactive components, scrolling, and video so that Figma can memorize the state, share it across the frames, and offer a way to reset. See a deep dive by noodles expert Niko on how to use the new features. (Also, this is my kind of joke.)

Molly Hellmuth shares her favorite tips from the “Figma like the Pro’s” series — editing Auto Layout directly on the frame, using Constraints with Grids, deleting and healing vectors, using Auto Layout as an organizing tool, and copying links to specific pages, frames, or sections.

A useful freebie from Luis Ouriach — 360 badges, pills, and tags in the full-color palette range.

In this Study Hall, Miggi shows how to make Interactive Component carousel galleries.

Fascinating comments from Sho Kuwamoto, Figma’s VP of Product, on how plugins are implemented. Each plugin runs in a security sandbox — “We actually took a JavaScript VM, compiled it down to WebAssembly, and then we run that VM inside of the browser. So it’s a completely separate engine than the native JS engine. For security reasons, we don't want two scripts running inside that VM, because then the two scripts could potentially have access to each other. And we don't want to run two instances of this VM, for memory reasons.” 🤯

In this video, Darshan Gajara from Consistent Creators podcast talks to Designer Advocate Luis Ouriach about his role at Figma, overcoming burnout, building an audience, and the breakdown of his viral Twitter threads.

Great examples of automating grunt work with the Automator plugin.

A simple but fun technique for creating cool animations with mirrored components.

Ridd just launched Deep Dives, “a new interview series full of stories and advice to help you take a huge leap forward in your career”. In the first episode, Joey Banks gives an in-depth look at what it’s like to lead design systems at Twitter and Webflow, shares his strategies for structuring component libraries, working efficiently in Figma, and even keeping up with all of the latest plugins and tooling.

A set of social widgets for Bento with a little extra depth from Double Glitch.

A quick demo of the sticky scroll feature introduced as part of the recent Little Big Updates.

Lauren shows how to create a micro animation (also known as micro interaction) using a heart icon. These interactions add a really fun touch, and I love that the tutorial uses a heart icon from another tutorial by Miggi.

Lauren Andres discovers an older feature “delete and heal” to create smoother vector lines.

Fons Mans is back with a new tutorial on how to create a glowing glass effect in Figma.

MDS with a great shortcut of double-clicking on a layer icon to zoom into selection.