In time for fully transitioning to UI3, Jay chats with Tim Van Damme who shows how he designed UI3 icons in Figma. You will learn about Tim’s icon design process, preserving visual weight, how he makes icons playful, and more. Don’t miss part 2, where they discuss designing UI3.

Luis Ouriach sat down with the Figma team to talk about craft – what is it, how do they define it, and how can you get better at it. This is the first out of three videos in a new mini-series called Blend Mode.

Y Combinator President & CEO Garry Tan sits down with Dylan Field to discuss ​“the evolving world of design in the age of AI, the challenging early days of the company, and how his team forever changed the way designers and engineers collaborate.”

Dann Petty has been one of the most vocal Figma critics lately. (See his previous post for some context, or go all the way back to moving drafts drama in the summer.) I don’t think corporations need help defending themselves, but in this case, I see the situation from a different angle and want to share some thoughts.

First, I built my first Framer website recently and thought it was a compelling alternative for designing websites. It often takes me longer to prototype a throw-away interaction in Figma than to do it straight in code (especially with AI!), so designing and animating the actual website instead of a mockup felt refreshing. I missed some of the more advanced features (no variables, really?), but I’m sure they are on the roadmap. In the end, it wasn’t the right tool for this project, but I agree with Dann that similar tools will be ​“owning the web design market”. That said, they have nothing to offer product designers.

Here is the part I disagree with: “(People are) mad at Figma because they lost focus on designers and got over bloated with useless features no one wanted or needed and started to focus on developers and their Config event.” Dann doesn’t specify which features he considers useless, but I assume it’s those related to larger design systems and developer handoff. Personally, I rarely feel restricted while working on visual design, but often hit the wall with a lack of CSS grids, inability to replicate the props.children behavior in components, still incomplete variables support, barebones design system analytics, Dev Mode, prototyping, etc. On my product team engineers outnumber designers 5 to 1, so a lot of our time and attention is spent on cross-team alignment. These features might be useless to freelancers and agencies, but worth their weight in gold to product teams.

Lastly, a note on Figma becoming ​“incredibly expensive.” First, they kept the same $15/​m price of the Professional plan since 2018. According to the CPI Inflation Calculator, $15 in 2018 had the same buying power as $19.31 today — pretty close to $20. Second, at least in the US, $20/​m or $192/​year is not much for a pro tool — some of my streaming and newspaper subscriptions cost more. Third, it now includes two more products! My team just upgraded our Figma account to the Organization plan and it was cheaper to wait for the new pricing as we no longer needed separate licenses for FigJam and Slides. This will not be true for everyone, but not all seats increased in price while getting some perks.

Luis is working on an incredible community resource. Can’t wait to dig into it!

Ridd shows an advanced way of using variables to simplify prototyping and save a bunch of screens.

Cool page curl prototype by Miggi. Don’t miss the page turn animation on click.

Creators can now add structured tags to boost visibility and make it easier for you to find the right templates, UI kits, or design assets in Figma.

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.”

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