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.

A new long-read from Luis Ouriach published in the Smashing Magazine: ​“Design systems can be of immense help, but failure to adopt them invalidates the hard work that goes into building the thing in the first place! In this two-part series of articles, Luis shares his experience with design systems and how you can overcome the potential pitfalls, starting from how to make designers on your team adopt the complex and well-built system that you created to what are the best naming conventions and how to handle the auto-layout of components, indexing/​search, and more.”

Miggi, Mal, and Lauren’s first reactions to using the new mind maps feature in FigJam.

As of last Thursday, mind maps are now live in FigJam!

Vijay took his old experimental prototype (see issue #89) further by teaching a head to talk! Smart use of video as audio and variables.

I didn’t know Cmd-clicking on the nodes of the shape releases the handles — a slick tip from Miggi!

Anthony DiSpezio shares instructions and a script to see your most used keyboard shortcuts in Figma. (Can be a great starting point for setting up an upcoming Creator Micro keyboard!) On my personal computer, the top 5 are undo, deep-select, zoom-in, measure-to-selection, and escape.

Ana Boyer with a tutorial on how to create a range slider with Auto Layout.

In a follow-up to the above interview, Niko and Garrett share what it means to establish a ​“prototyping culture” in your company and why it matters. ​“Prototyping creates an interactive experience that brings the product to life, revealing interactions that might be overlooked in static designs. When integrated into the product development process early, it saves engineering time and streamlines workflows. Adopting a prototyping culture fosters innovation.”

Double Glitch presents the video tutorial on cursor tracking technique as the first part of his series on advanced prototyping in Figma. You might remember his demo of this effect from a few months ago. A smart way to achieve the effect with a grid of interactive components!

Ridd interviewed Nikolas Klein and Garrett Miller from the prototyping team at Figma. Together, they provide a behind-the-scenes look at everything that led up to the advanced prototyping release at Config 2023. For a few takeaways on two types of prototypes and the use of variables, see this thread by Ridd.

Sho Kuwamoto on variables and simplicity: ​“The obvious way to make things simpler is to remove things. Or maybe hide things. But one of the surprising aspects of simplicity is that sometimes, in order to make things feel more simple, you have to add more stuff.”

Jacob Miller, a Product Manager on the Design Systems team, unpacks the new features and answers questions about variables: ​“Our latest updates to variables in Figma allow for even more flexibility with updates to stroke weight, effects, layout grid, and layer opacity, along with nested instance variant binding. These upgrades not only boost design customization, they help align design and code like never before. Here, we share an overview of what we’re shipping with variables, how to use them in your current workflow, and where we’re going next with typography.”

Not mentioned in the article, but my favorite update is that now the variables authoring window can be resized! See also this thread by Luis, and Hugo’s accurate summary of the community’s reaction.

Congrats to Jordan Singer on making it to the Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list: ​“Product designer-turned-entrepreneur Jorgan Singer founded Diagram, a startup that created web-based design tools dubbed ​“Magician” and ​“Genius” that used AI and text-based prompts to generate design ideas and suggest design recommendations. Diagram quickly gained steam among its 100,000 users before being acquired by $20 billion design company Figma in 2023.” For more of his story, listen to the ​“Building Design Tools” episode of the Design is for Everyone Podcast and a long list of ideas that he has built since 2015.

A quick tutorial on creating light rays inspired by Rogie and Vijay with the Noise & Texture plugin.

A new webinar is a panel discussion with Hugo Raymond, a Designer Advocate at Figma, and three guests: Karl Kech, Design Engineer at DuckDuckGo; Amber Feinerman, Design Systems at Netflix; and Pranathi Peri, Product Designer at Graphite. They discuss the evolving role of design engineers and technologists in the tech industry, career progression, impact, specialization, and navigating the gap between design and engineering.

Fons Mans partnered with Framer again this year for a new advent calendar of design gifts — everything from heavily discounted apps to free icon and wallpaper packs.

Nice update to the Community resource pages — a new image gallery, plugin videos, and picking a relevant category to better showcase what kind of resource it is and what it can do. Also, remixes can no longer be published as they were misleading when it came to the authorship of the original resources.