Dan Hollick explains the science behind making realistic shadows and recommends the Beautiful Shadows plugin that takes care of this for you.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Christine Vallaure reminds us of using Selection Colors for applying variables to multiple objects.

“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.

Friends of Figma, Portugal community organizes a full-day hybrid event on September 25, 2023. 

Lilibeth Bustos Linares interviews Miguel Cardona at the SoulDoodles podcast, where they trace his inspiring journey from being an assistant professor at RIT, to leading product design at Imgix, and to joining Figma as a Designer Advocate for Education.

A new tutorial from Vijay Verma on creating an animation for a loader indicator shaped like a glass filled with liquid. The prototype uses a few variables and conditions, and he shares them in the cheat sheet in the thread.

Christine Vallaure wrote about one of the most under-the-radar new features of the Dev Mode — units conversion. Now, you can design with pixels and then translate them to rem or other relative units in code. (Thanks for sharing the friend link with Figmalion, Christine!)