Jake made a plugin that brings the power of CSS color-mix() into Figma. Use it to generate swatches, variable ramps, and solid or gradient fills. I highly recommend watching Jake’s video if you’re unfamiliar with this CSS notation.

Ridd argues that the pendulum has swung too far, and designers hating on design systems are missing the point. You might not need an enterprise-grade system with all bells and whistles, but every product can benefit from a set of simple components: ​“I’ll suggest design systems are most valuable when you DON’T know what the product will be… Investing in a set of core components minimizes the number of knobs you need to turn in order to iterate.”

In this video, Ridd shares the behind-the-scenes process of redesigning a website for Genway, from generating and exploring new ideas to skipping wireframing and going straight to high-fidelity work to progressively presenting ideas to stakeholders.

Weeks after leaving Figma, Jordan Singer introduced Mainframe, ​“a future operating system with AI as the default”.

(Made me think of Playbit, started by Rasmus Andersson a few years ago. What’s up with ex-Figma designers starting operating systems?!)

I love how Figma showcased the community work on a giant screen at Times Square.

In this webinar, Designer Advocates Corey Lee and Hugo Raymond will guide you through communicating effectively through story-driven presentations and share techniques to up-level your slide designs to make your presentations and decks more compelling. ​“Good design tells a compelling story. How you convey that story can significantly impact its resonance with your audience.“

I love when Luis gets down to the nitty-gritty of the mundane daily challenges: ​“If my team needs to ship a feature that uses version 1, and your team needs to support version 2 because you’re releasing much further in the future, how do we manage that with a single component in a single library? As soon as we update the component to version 2 in our library and hit the publish button, every single designer is grandfathered into the newest version. This should be sending alarm bells to us all! We need the ability to maintain two separate versions of the same component, but unfortunately this isn’t possible within Figma yet. As a result, we need to think laterally to figure out a solution for all.”

He makes so many good points: ​“Centrally though, I believe we should strive for a world where design files are throwaway deliverables, versus an ongoing ​“forever file” that’s constantly updated.”

Last June, Figma acquired Diagram — one of the most promising startups building at the intersection of design and AI. Their small team of five joined Figma to build the AI features announced at this year’s Config.

During the last few weeks, 3 out of 5 ex-Diagram teammates left Figma. Founding Engineer Sidd announced his departure first and soon joined Vercel to work on v0. Founder & CEO Jordan Singer and Founding Product Designer Marco Cornacchia announced their resignations on the same day. I’ll be keeping an eye on Design Engineer Vincent van der Meulen and ML Engineer Andrew Pouliot.

Luis Ouriach: ​“No one can deny the importance of accessibility, but successfully embedding accessibility into the heart of a business is no simple task. So where do you start?”

Molly recommends organizing components with sections to provide a hierarchy in the Assets panel and allow viewing components with a specific background color. Pro tip: set a background to a ​“danger” color for deprecated components.

It was a great episode of the ​“In the File” series, where Luis Ouriach talks to the designer Yann-Edern Gillet and engineer Andreas Eldh from Linear about the recent update of their design system. I love their use of the LCH color space to generate a consistent palette and tight collaboration between design and engineering.

New plugin for Vijay Verma for creating a beautiful stippling effect.

Figma Developer Advocate Jake Albaugh joins a livestream on the Visual Studio Code channel to talk about Figma for VS Code extension, allowing developers to easily access and inspect designs from VS Code.

In a short video, Ridd shows how to set up and use the Raycast Figma File Search extension to navigate your Figma files quickly.

Brilliant tip from Molly Hellmuth — create a special text style for labels where line height aligns to your grid. No matter what variable is used for padding, the height of your UI elements will be a multiple of the base grid. (This is also a nice way to keep your labels aligned with icons.)

Layers, a community conference by Friends of Figma, Portugal, published an extended list of speakers. Register for a free virtual or in-person event on September 20th to catch talks by designers from Shopify, Miro, ADPList, Volvo, and more.

Vijay Verma made a tiny plugin to simplify the vector editing workflow when working on illustrations. Here is how it started: ​“After releasing UI3, people have been complaining that the boolean task is a bit hard to find. So, I thought, why not create a tiny plugin with some of the most commonly used options for vector work?”

Molly Hellmuth shares daily discoveries while working on the UI Prep design system update. There are great tips on pairing heading and body sizes, clearly marking a default text size, avoiding hiding components with a period or underline in the name, scoping variables in bulk, establishing a set of ​“surface” colors, removing a focused state, and including a special data text style for tables.

Nathan A Curtis maintained ~2,000 slides worth of workshops and talks in Figma for four years, so his feedback on Figma Slides is worth listening to. His biggest complaint is a lack of templates and styles on the Professional plan, but in the replies Slides PM Mihika Kapoor confirmed that Pro templates are coming soon.

Slides PM Mihika Kapoor shares how to run the perfect product review using Figma Slides. You’ll learn best practices for getting the input you need, driving decisions, and aligning stakeholders around the work.