A new plugin from Vijay for creating invoices in Figma.

Luis and Molly discuss how every small and large decision was made in Figma’s Simple Design System.

Luis Ouriach: ​“If you’re working in a team with either multiple brands, multiple platforms, multiple densities, or perhaps all of the above you may be stuck trying to figure out how to structure your system/​s in Figma. Here are some loose thoughts on how I’d go about approaching the problem.”

Joey Banks explains how to use constraints to create responsive components that work with nearly endless screen widths and heights. One hidden feature he didn’t mention is a special relationship between constraints and layout grids — see my old article ​“Using Constraints with Layout Grids in Figma” from 2020.

At a recent meetup, Developer Advocate Jake Albaugh shared the story of Figma’s SDS, a UI kit with a realistic code backing to help bridge the gap between design and development. As a reminder, the Simple Design System is available in the Libraries selector, Figma community, and GitHub.

Impressive lightsaber loader effect by Vijay.

In this workshop, Miggi explores approaches to Advanced prototyping in Figma: ​“We‘ll walk through examples using variables and component sets to create dynamic prototypes that are easy to manage and iterate upon. This is an intermediate level workshop and builds on a basic understanding of prototyping in Figma Design.”

Joey Banks with a deep dive on applying and organizing variables in Figma: “…if there’s one thing I’ve learned about variables, it’s that nearly every team takes a slightly different approach when it comes to creating and keeping them organized in Figma. I’d love to recap the many ways I use variables within the components and libraries I make, as well as some of the techniques and decision frameworks that have helped me most, and share with you how I approach creating and keeping them all organized, too.”

Rogie is just showing off with this beautiful artwork.

Vijay always finds the most remarkable applications for the new Figma features. This one uses the new duplicate and rotate.

“Notion, Arc and Figma are teaming up to help you have your best semester yet. Join us for a special Back-to-School webinar featuring an exclusive panel with all 3 co-founder/CEOs (Dylan Field, Figma; Ivan Zhao, Notion; Josh Miller, The Browser Company) reflecting on their student days, followed by demos from fellow students showing how they set up these tools to organize their busy lives (and tame the chaos).”

Joey Banks shows one of the newly announced features. When objects are duplicated, rotated, and then duplicated again, Figma will continue that rotation with subsequent copies of your object.

Jake made a plugin that brings the power of CSS color-mix() into Figma. Use it to generate swatches, variable ramps, and solid or gradient fills. I highly recommend watching Jake’s video if you’re unfamiliar with this CSS notation.

Ridd argues that the pendulum has swung too far, and designers hating on design systems are missing the point. You might not need an enterprise-grade system with all bells and whistles, but every product can benefit from a set of simple components: ​“I’ll suggest design systems are most valuable when you DON’T know what the product will be… Investing in a set of core components minimizes the number of knobs you need to turn in order to iterate.”

In this video, Ridd shares the behind-the-scenes process of redesigning a website for Genway, from generating and exploring new ideas to skipping wireframing and going straight to high-fidelity work to progressively presenting ideas to stakeholders.

Weeks after leaving Figma, Jordan Singer introduced Mainframe, ​“a future operating system with AI as the default”.

(Made me think of Playbit, started by Rasmus Andersson a few years ago. What’s up with ex-Figma designers starting operating systems?!)

I love how Figma showcased the community work on a giant screen at Times Square.

In this webinar, Designer Advocates Corey Lee and Hugo Raymond will guide you through communicating effectively through story-driven presentations and share techniques to up-level your slide designs to make your presentations and decks more compelling. ​“Good design tells a compelling story. How you convey that story can significantly impact its resonance with your audience.“

I love when Luis gets down to the nitty-gritty of the mundane daily challenges: ​“If my team needs to ship a feature that uses version 1, and your team needs to support version 2 because you’re releasing much further in the future, how do we manage that with a single component in a single library? As soon as we update the component to version 2 in our library and hit the publish button, every single designer is grandfathered into the newest version. This should be sending alarm bells to us all! We need the ability to maintain two separate versions of the same component, but unfortunately this isn’t possible within Figma yet. As a result, we need to think laterally to figure out a solution for all.”

He makes so many good points: ​“Centrally though, I believe we should strive for a world where design files are throwaway deliverables, versus an ongoing ​“forever file” that’s constantly updated.”

Last June, Figma acquired Diagram — one of the most promising startups building at the intersection of design and AI. Their small team of five joined Figma to build the AI features announced at this year’s Config.

During the last few weeks, 3 out of 5 ex-Diagram teammates left Figma. Founding Engineer Sidd announced his departure first and soon joined Vercel to work on v0. Founder & CEO Jordan Singer and Founding Product Designer Marco Cornacchia announced their resignations on the same day. I’ll be keeping an eye on Design Engineer Vincent van der Meulen and ML Engineer Andrew Pouliot.