In case you said goodbye to Dev Mode last week, Molly Hellmuth recommends a few plugins to help fill in the gap — Annotate It, Print Variables, Frame History, EightShapes Specs, and Handoff Notes.

I’ve seen a lot of confusion over the removal of the Inspect panel and the introduction of Dev Mode, so happy to see a detailed walkthrough of the free viewer experience recorded by Tom Lowry. Pretty much everything from the old Inspect panel is still available for free, and Dev Mode builds on top of that foundation. While some will inevitably label Dev Mode as a ​“money grab”, I won’t be surprised if many teams will save money by converting full Design seats to standalone Dev Mode seats.

An inspiring story from Corey Lee on becoming a Figma Designer Advocate in Japan through community work and advocacy. ​“I’d never heard of a Designer Advocate but after reading the role description I realized all the things I had been doing up until that point all related to the role: advocating for design, enabling designers, creating content, and building community. I already was a designer advocate.”

Ridd goes deeper into one of the topics they’ve covered with Molly and suggests questions to ask yourself before committing to a new Figma feature or workflow. One common theme in all three of his ​“regrets” is complexity — just like in code, it can be considered a detectable ​“smell”.

So excited for this episode of Ridd’s Deep Dives podcast with Molly Hellmuth! They get into the nerdier side of Figma and discuss adopting variables, making sure you don’t invest in a Figma strategy that you’ll regret later, Molly’s favorite design systems plugins, and how she’s building components differently in v8 of her UI Prep design system.

A month of 29 daily Figma challenges starts on Thursday, February 1st! The project was started last year by Vijay Verma and this year features challenges from Rogie, Miggi, Pablo Stanley, Vyshnav, Desmond, Steven H‑A, and myself. Looking forward to seeing what everyone will come up with!

Loved Tom Lowry’s thoughts on designer-developer collaboration in this thread. I think most teams agree that the traditional process of throwing designs over the wall to engineers is broken and we need better tools, but I’m also cautiously skeptical of designers working directly with the source within the design tools. While this is already possible for marketing websites (hello, Webflow and Framer!), products and design systems bring a whole new level of complexity and challenges. This iteration of the Dev Mode seems like a first step in the right direction to me, but the road ahead is lengthy but bright.

In this episode of the ​“Tech Chat” podcast, Luis shares his journey, shedding light on how he found his path to Figma and what it’s like to serve as a design advocate.

Chad shows how to use variables to change your variants on nested component instances when setting a mode.

A few less-known and undervalued tips from Mal on working with comments in Figma. Personally, I had no idea that comments can be added to a selection or can contain images! I’d also suggest enabling the ​“Only current page” filter to keep a list focused.

Luis wonders whether variables scoping provides enough semantic modification to justify removing explicit ​“background”, ​“border”, and ​“text” color variables. ​“What’s stopping us from maintaining a single, primitive set of variables, named as such (e.g. red-300) to match your developer’s framework, relying on scoping alone to bridge this gap?” (See the discussion in this thread on X.)

I also like this take from Nate Baldwin — primitive color palettes are inherently semantic because every lightness stop is knowingly created to be used for specific use cases. He supports this idea with examples from his work on Adobe’s Spectrum color palette.

The Designer Advocate team recently hosted another Office Hours AMA focused on the use of variables in Figma. Watch Lauren Andres, Luis Ouriach, Chad Bergman, and Shana Hu discuss nested instance variant binding, applying boolean variables, and a few related questions.

Miggi goes over all of the basics when getting started with variables and modes for your design layouts. ​“Explore what it takes to use variables to create a dark and light mode experience, change the density of your spacing, vary the languages your design UI can accommodate, and so much more.”

Molly Hellmuth suggests building small design habits in a new year that will make future you grateful — sticking to one naming format, avoiding groups, adding thumbnails to files, naming all your layers (good luck!), and unifying the name of your icon shapes.

Miggi celebrates his 3rd anniversary at Figma (congratulations!) by demonstrating how to make a color wheel. (A coincidence, but just earlier this week I was making the same color wheel with a very similar technique!)

Ridd recommends including little nav menus in high-fidelity prototypes so that viewers can easily inspect the different states of a page. Great advice and something I’m going to introduce to my prototypes!

A cool tutorial on creating an animated card background using Rogie​’s popular Noise & Texture plugin — fast-forward to the end to see the final result.

Jenny Wen ​“templatized” some of the frameworks she’s been using over and over again in her role as a design manager and pillar lead of FigJam. There are 11 FigJam (no surprise!) templates for strategy, managing, and meetings.

Rafal Tomal wrote a simple guide for non-designers like content creators, copywriters, marketers, and others who want to be able to create quick graphics on their own without learning all the advanced Figma features: ​“At the end of this guide, you’ll know how to create your own file in Figma, set up the frame (the artboard for your image) at the size you need, add some text and images, and export it to PNG or JPG.”

A large profile of FigJam AI in Fast Company. ​“Figma’s AI ambitions are clear. Singer noted that ​‘we really do think of AI as playing a central role across the entirety of the platform.’ In theory, that could mean not just better meetings, but more capable coworkers. ​‘In a collaborative environment where you’re working with many people on a project,’ Singer says, ​‘AI really up-levels everyone.’”