Luis Ouriach built a plugin for copying or exporting your Figma variables into CSS variables format.

A new plugin by Vijay Verma to quickly create animated smart components that are used most of the time, like rotate, zoom, slide, etc. It generates a set of components based on the selected animation preset.

Chad from Figma explains how Library Analytics in Figma Organization and Enterprise enables you to gain insights into library usage trends and drill into component, style, and variable usage.

Miggi explains and shows the new export options in action.

Jake returns with my favorite video series, this time explaining how to modify variable code syntax using JavaScript in the dev console. (Kudos to the video editor!)

Miggi shows a wildly creative application of boolean groups to vector networks.

Developer Advocate Akbar and Designer Advocate Tom talk about data as an often overlooked aspect of design. Real-world data not only shapes how designs appear but can also challenge initial ideas. This presents a valuable opportunity for designers and developers to collaborate, understand available data, and even imagine new possibilities. This deep dive features a real-world example from the development of Figma’s Library Analytics.

You can always rely on Vijay to come up with the most creative ways to achieve special effects.

It’s time to sharpen your Figma skills! Figbruary is an entire month of Figma challenges organized by Vijay Verma. Every day, a new prompt from someone in the Figma community involves designing a UI, drawing an illustration, making a prototype, or creating an animation. Make something fun, share your work, and tag it with #figbruary or #figbruary2025.

Figma Community Forum got a big makeover in January. It’s a great place to ask questions or share your thoughts.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy from the Invest Like The Best podcast interviews Dylan Field, covering ​“the hardest part of building in private, his principles for avoiding common design pitfalls, and why human creativity is still as relevant as ever despite the growing capabilities of AI models.”

Fons Mans now uses Figma mostly to translate ideas onto the screen quickly, then switches to a tool that lets him build or create the final product or visual. Cameron Moll also follows this approach.

It works really well when the designer is involved in the implementation. Figma is a fantastic tool for quickly exploring different directions, but after reaching an alignment, it’s time to polish the final version of the product, not its image. I was frustrated by wasting time whenever I spent hours prototyping an elaborate but disposable interaction in Figma. Modern AI tools make this final iteration even more accessible to less technical folks. That said, in most organizations, designers still can’t touch code — either that will change, or the final polish will still be happening in Figma for quite some time.

Luis considers using opacity to decrease the volume of variables in the design system.

First Round’s deep dive into how Figma Slides founding PM Mihika Kapoor transformed a hackathon project into one of Figma’s most anticipated launches.

Disney’s Lead Product Designer Jeremy Dizon joins Designer Advocate Chad Bergman to talk about the underlying side of building, supporting, and evolving design systems.

A new episode of Figma’s series Bridging the Gap, where Developer Advocate Akbar Mirza chats with Designer Advocates to understand and improve the process behind their collaboration. In this conversation with Ana Boyer, they discuss starting and maintaining design systems that work for different teams.

Developer Advocate Jake Albaugh gives a mind-blowing tip on running Plugin API code inside Figma’s JavaScript console. Even while I built a couple of Figma plugins in the past, I didn’t realize how easily accessible this API is for day-to-day tasks. Definitely going to adopt this in my workflow.

Jake Albaugh talks about how modern browsers have evolved beyond what most design tools can do: ​“While many designers and developers have been working within familiar constraints, browsers have undergone a quiet revolution. The web now supports features like container queries, advanced scoping and inheritance, and responsiveness to user preference. It’s gotten much more sophisticated in terms of color, typography, dynamic units, layouts, and animation. Yet so many young designers and developers I talk to as a Developer Advocate at Figma aren’t aware of these possibilities. We’re still operating within old paradigms instead of pushing the boundaries of what the browser can do.”

Luis Ouriach released a free shadcn/​ui Figma kit, including Tailwind colors, semantic light/​dark colors, typographic variables and styles, effects, components, example pages, and space utility variables. If you’re curious how it was made, Luis documented every step of the process, starting back in September of last year.

I loved this example of going deep on a topic using FigJam. Tom Lowry, Figma’s Advocacy Director, shows how he approached researching and building a custom mountain bike by mapping out and thinking through every aspect of the build in FigJam.