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.’”

Vijay shared his collection of loader prototypes in the community.

Fons Mans explains how to create an image fade effect in Figma.

Double Glitch reproduced in Figma a cool (or should I say ​“frozen”? Sorry!) effect first created by Marcus Eckert for the Riveo app. This cursor-tracking prototyping technique is getting wild!

How to preserve a button’s volume across multiple themes? Ridd suggests combining brand variables with a style wrapper for reusing gradients.

Molly Hellmuth recommends dividing design system assets into four files for increased flexibility and improved performance. These include Foundations, Icons, Components, and a separate design file with ​“local” assets.

I wonder what that button on Jordan’s micro keyboard does?

In the second part of his monumental article, Luis covers ​“how to build adaptable, indexable, logical, and specific components as part of the FRAILS framework.” (The two-part series was strategically published before the Christmas break, giving you some extra time to read it.)

Dylan Field: ​“Figma and Adobe have reached a joint decision to end our pending acquisition. It’s not the outcome we had hoped for, but despite thousands of hours spent with regulators around the world detailing differences between our businesses, our products, and the markets we serve, we no longer see a path toward regulatory approval of the deal.”

In this interview, Figma CPO Yuhki Yamashita reflects on his journey as a PM and what he has learned trying to build products that people love.

A new code plugin from Jake, Figma Developer Advocate: ​“This plugin allows you to write and generate code snippets for Figma nodes, which are rendered in the Inspect Panel in Dev Mode. You can make these code snippets dynamic, by referring to parameters provided by the plugin. Doing this for your component library will bring accurate code snippets to any project that incorporates your design system.”

Vijay challenged himself to create a small set of icons in 2 minutes — that’s just 12 seconds per icon! My takeaway is the importance of a good starting grid template (like this one from Font Awesome) that saves a ton of time and helps with consistency.

Double Glitch is building on the powerful cursor-tracking technique I shared in the previous issue with a new tutorial for creating an interactive glowing card using a resource file he published in the community.