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.

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.”