Vijay Verma made a photo-realistic illustration of the Nintendo Switch console with 150+ primitive shapes, inner shadows, and gradients.
Spent some time over the weekend creating one of my fav console nintendo switch in @figma 🎮. Creating these products with primitive shapes, inner shadows and gradients is a lot of fun ✨ pic.twitter.com/PyX1nynj3O
— vijay verma (@realvjy) August 15, 2023
Miggi shows how to make a notification badge that expands to fill its contents with Auto Layout.
A short video on using the bezier curve tool to make an S‑shaped curve.
Molly shares the best practices for working with color that she learned from the Adobe Spectrum design system.
💡 Figma tip: 5 color best practices I'm stealing from Adobe Spectrum while I update my design system to include variables ✨🎨
— Molly Hellmuth (@molly_hellmuth) August 11, 2023
Keep reading for tips & examples.. pic.twitter.com/rVMX1Zp6oJ
Dan Hollick explains the science behind making realistic shadows and recommends the Beautiful Shadows plugin that takes care of this for you.
What makes a shadow look realistic?
— Dan Hollick 🇿🇦 (@DanHollick) August 9, 2023
Well, there are essentially two parts to a shadow: the fully occluded part (Umbra), and the partially occluded part (Penumbra).
Ideally, you need at least two layers of drop shadow to mimic these. pic.twitter.com/fJ7NgiMJKg
Ridd interviews Luis Ouriach about using variables for his Deep Dives podcast. ​“Luis goes deep into strategies based on team size, provides naming guidance, and even breaks down how he thinks about structuring libraries with variables in Figma. Lastly, Luis shares a behind-the-scenes of his journey as a designer advocate and even gives a unique prediction for how AI will take shape inside of Figma.”
According to Corey Lee, the copy-pasting of collections is coming soon!
Have you ever wanted to copy/paste variable collections between files including alias and collection dependencies? It's coming...#figmaplugin #figma pic.twitter.com/qRC9XkK6xB
— Corey Lee (@factorzero) August 9, 2023
During Maker Week, Rogie built a handy plugin for attaching files to the Figma document for hand-off. Great tool for sharing fonts, high-resolution pictures, or other assets with developers.
Luis updated Figma’s public UI2 design system file with all the features and elements introduced since its last update in 2019. His process is fascinating to follow and shows how much work went into this little update! Also has some great tips on plugins and the organization of a large design system.
Vijay recreated a Fujifilm X100V camera using mostly primitive shapes with shadows and gradients. As a Fuji shooter since the days of X‑T1, I love seeing his attention to detail in this illustration! See this thread for his tips on creating a metal pattern and a camera texture.
Creativity is great, but it can get messy. How do you balance creative chaos and stakeholder visibility? Hugo Raymond spoke to Bupa to uncover their approach.
Christine Vallaure reminds us of using Selection Colors for applying variables to multiple objects.
Tip: Quickly add #figma color variables. Don't select each element individually -make a bulk selection and jump to "Selection colors" at the end of your properties panel. Easy and efficient! This way, you ensure you don't miss any elements and can even out slight color imbalances pic.twitter.com/NZsHU9a16A
— Christine Vallaure (@moonlearning) July 31, 2023
“Saving” and ​“liking” resources are now combined to make Community simpler to use. Your saved resources are available from your Community profile or the Resources dropdown in a Figma file.
The number of installs or downloads used to be the only metric in the Community, but over time it was replaced with how many times a resource was used. Now you can also rate and review Community resources. It’ll be interesting to see which of the most used resources are also the most loved ones.
Ridd shares a free annotation components library to help designers communicate more effectively and nail down the handoff process. Comes with a video lesson on organizing Figma files using the helpers library.
…and one more list, but for advanced prototyping!
At Smashing Meets Figma event, Christine Vallaure showed how to add real data to your Figma designs, and various ways to include Google Sheets and API data via Kernel.
Miggi on using sections in Figma for prototypes and how to preserve the state of a given flow.
Designer Advocate Mallory mapped out a helpful list of resources like YouTube videos, playgrounds, community files, plugins, and articles to get started with Variables.
Molly shares her 3 favorite tips from the Config talk ​“Designer and developer workflows unlocked using Dev Mode” — using ​“Compare changes” (my favorite as well, and the first thing I showed my team!), testing components in the Playground, and switching between the design and Dev Mode by pressing the Shift‑D shortcut.
đź’ˇ Start using Figma's new dev mode with these 3 tips!
— Molly Hellmuth (@molly_hellmuth) July 28, 2023
Config's deep dive on dev mode with @Avantika789, @laurenbandres, @jennylea_, and Jake Albaugh is CHALK FULL of amazing tips!
Keep reading for my favorite 3.. pic.twitter.com/xf8dM6nYfb