Jake goes into the relationship between design and development in product creation and illustrates it using a quadrant model, dividing the process into four key areas: product design, design patterns, product development, and development patterns. Successful collaboration requires trust and a deep understanding of each other’s perspectives.

“Figma can be a magical place to collaborate, build, and ship, but if you’re just starting out, it can be overwhelming. Join our team for a Q&A focused on the need to know features for those just getting started to help you build out your Figma designs successfully and efficiently.”

A new design system from Meng To with hundreds of customizable Figma and Framer components and templates. Looks incredible, and the kit is meticulously organized with variables, variants, and adaptive layouts. See also his recent livestream with a discussion around key challenges while building the design system, the experience of using Figma variables and components, and tips for transitioning from Figma to Framer.

I missed Vijay’s Figma recreations! A great illustration of the Sony Walkman, full of little details and textures. ​“Most of the shapes are created using primitive shapes with shadows and blend modes.”

The good thing about evergreen tips is, well, that they do not get old — I keep forgetting about this one! Right-click while holding the Control key to see a list of objects below your cursor.

Christine Vallaure explains how to use boolean variables and modes to reduce the number of necessary components. One important caveat: ​“I would always recommend adding a documentation sheet to avoid confusion as per default, only the first mode will be displayed, and in development mode, hidden elements are not highlighted.” See also a second thread on using variables to trigger actions in prototypes once a specific threshold is reached.

Peter Yang interviewed Yuhki Yamashita about building FigJam AI, creating a culture where PMs and designers love their craft, making design accessible to everyone, and balancing new and power user needs. Most of Yuhki’s advice in this interview is for PMs, but it still applies to any product designer. (The interview is paywalled, but there is a lot of good stuff in the preview.)

Love this story about FigJam’s early days: ​“We had a meeting with our board two months before we were going to launch FigJam. The board asked us what our differentiator was since there were many other whiteboard tools. And Dylan said, ​“Well, it’s fun!” But then we realized that the product wasn’t fun enough. So the FigJam team ran a sprint called ​“FunJam” to come up with all the playful features that you see today like cursor chat, emotes, and more. So you’re absolutely right – fun was a core principle. Most workplace tools are a little boring and confine you in a box. We want to give you an inviting canvas with many lightweight ways to express yourself.”

Some great recommendations for quality unitasker plugins in Fons Mans’s comments.

Vijay Verma made a new plugin for adding a color gradient map effect to your graphics. As expected, it comes with cool predefined gradients created by him to get you started.

Miggi shows how to incorporate video prototyping into your designs and make interactive presentations. ​“Using video in Figma prototypes can create a more realistic experience, and add a level of polish when testing designs. We will dig into some real-life examples and walk through the many ways you can interact with, and use video to drive your interactions. We’ll cover aspects of video prototyping such as adding video to the canvas, previewing and adjusting video on the canvas, state management and video continuity across frames, and advanced interactions like ​“when the video hits”.

Rogie with a mini-tutorial on making Mario Kart-inspired resizable buttons with fun shapes.

Harry McCracken published a big story about Figma and Dylan Field at Fast Company. It talks about Adobe’s acquisition and what it could mean for both companies, the future of design in the era of AI, the origin story of Figma, and their big ambition to ​“make creativity the new productivity”. 

A deep dive into Figma’s various license tiers and the features/​capabilities available in each.

A recording of Miggi’s recent Twitch livestream on interactive components.

Christine shows how to use a Scroll To action to seamlessly connect navigation on a single-page website, create horizontal scroll effects, and scroll in multiple directions.

I dig this tip from Zander — sometimes we already have the right tools without plugins.

Christine Vallaure with timeless advice of using percentages instead of pixels for specifying line height in Figma. There are very few cases when pixels make sense, and more often than not they cause inconvenience.

Whoa, I didn’t know that selections can be moved! Great for getting to the tricky areas.

Designer Advocate Ana Boyer shares some common questions, answers, and resources that she came across when learning about design systems, tokens, and variables. 

Luis shows how to descope and unpublish primitive variables from the design system.