It’s time to sharpen your Figma skills! Figbruary is an entire month of Figma challenges organized by Vijay Verma. Every day, a new prompt from someone in the Figma community involves designing a UI, drawing an illustration, making a prototype, or creating an animation. Make something fun, share your work, and tag it with #figbruary or #figbruary2025.

Figma Community Forum got a big makeover in January. It’s a great place to ask questions or share your thoughts.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy from the Invest Like The Best podcast interviews Dylan Field, covering ​“the hardest part of building in private, his principles for avoiding common design pitfalls, and why human creativity is still as relevant as ever despite the growing capabilities of AI models.”

Fons Mans now uses Figma mostly to translate ideas onto the screen quickly, then switches to a tool that lets him build or create the final product or visual. Cameron Moll also follows this approach.

It works really well when the designer is involved in the implementation. Figma is a fantastic tool for quickly exploring different directions, but after reaching an alignment, it’s time to polish the final version of the product, not its image. I was frustrated by wasting time whenever I spent hours prototyping an elaborate but disposable interaction in Figma. Modern AI tools make this final iteration even more accessible to less technical folks. That said, in most organizations, designers still can’t touch code — either that will change, or the final polish will still be happening in Figma for quite some time.

Luis considers using opacity to decrease the volume of variables in the design system.

First Round’s deep dive into how Figma Slides founding PM Mihika Kapoor transformed a hackathon project into one of Figma’s most anticipated launches.

Disney’s Lead Product Designer Jeremy Dizon joins Designer Advocate Chad Bergman to talk about the underlying side of building, supporting, and evolving design systems.

A new episode of Figma’s series Bridging the Gap, where Developer Advocate Akbar Mirza chats with Designer Advocates to understand and improve the process behind their collaboration. In this conversation with Ana Boyer, they discuss starting and maintaining design systems that work for different teams.

Developer Advocate Jake Albaugh gives a mind-blowing tip on running Plugin API code inside Figma’s JavaScript console. Even while I built a couple of Figma plugins in the past, I didn’t realize how easily accessible this API is for day-to-day tasks. Definitely going to adopt this in my workflow.

Jake Albaugh talks about how modern browsers have evolved beyond what most design tools can do: ​“While many designers and developers have been working within familiar constraints, browsers have undergone a quiet revolution. The web now supports features like container queries, advanced scoping and inheritance, and responsiveness to user preference. It’s gotten much more sophisticated in terms of color, typography, dynamic units, layouts, and animation. Yet so many young designers and developers I talk to as a Developer Advocate at Figma aren’t aware of these possibilities. We’re still operating within old paradigms instead of pushing the boundaries of what the browser can do.”

Luis Ouriach released a free shadcn/​ui Figma kit, including Tailwind colors, semantic light/​dark colors, typographic variables and styles, effects, components, example pages, and space utility variables. If you’re curious how it was made, Luis documented every step of the process, starting back in September of last year.

I loved this example of going deep on a topic using FigJam. Tom Lowry, Figma’s Advocacy Director, shows how he approached researching and building a custom mountain bike by mapping out and thinking through every aspect of the build in FigJam.

Mal and Akbar discuss ways to bridge the gap between designers and developers.

Jacob Miller from Figma ran a poll and discovered that ¹⁄₃ of designers misunderstand DPI. In this post, he explains the relationship between pixel count, DPI, and physical size.

Miggi shows three updates to frame presets in UI3: the first frame dropped onto a blank canvas will land at 0x0y coordinates; when clicking on the canvas to add a new frame, Figma will default to the size of the last-used frame; when using the frame tool, quick-add indicators will appear beside and between frames so you can quickly insert additional frames.

Prevent accidental removal of FigJam sections by locking the background of a section.

Molly Hellmuth had Brad Frost, author of Atomic Design, as a special guest at one of the recent cohorts of her Design System Bootcamp course. Molly’s students asked him so many great questions that after the Q&A, he recorded a video answering them again for a wider audience. Topics include design systems, workflow, atomic design, the future of design systems, buy-in, designer-developer collaboration, personal development, and global design system stuff. 

The next cohort of Molly’s 5‑week course starts on January 13th, which is the last scheduled cohort for now. Molly generously offers Figmalion readers $100 off with the coupon code FIGMALION100.

Ridd interviewed Andrei Herasimchuk, who had one of the most enviable design careers as an interface designer of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and later the first designer at Figma, with stints at Twitter, Yahoo, and Booking in between. I’ve been following him since the Adobe days, but I had no idea he also contributed to Figma early on!

A new plugin from Meng To turns Figma designs into production-level code with the power of Claude AI and GPT-4o. I mentioned it in the last newsletter, and it looks very promising so far. The plugin is free, but you’ll need to bring your own API keys.

Watch the video where Meng explains his Figma to SwiftUI code workflow.

Molly Hellmuth with a tip on using the ​“Ignore auto layout” feature to add a scrollbar to the menu, among other things. It’s one of my favorite features, making it easy to preserve Auto Layout while making designs more realistic and interesting.