Molly Hellmuth shared a few tips from her recent event with Smashing Magazine.

The new series at Figma blog, Meet the Maker, kicks off with Marcin Wichary, a design manager from the Editor team. I wrote about Marcin’s book Shift Happens in issue #102 — since then, it became the #1 tech book of all time on Kickstarter and reached its final stretch goal! This is a lovely interview touching on many topics close to my heart — exploring niche interests, making things, experimenting, prototyping, getting feedback, and obsessing over details.

The first installment of ​“Fridays with Fons”, where Fons Mans shows how to create and generate fun, geometric illustrations in Figma in just a few easy steps.

Rogie King reflects on the launch of new selling tools and the Figma Creator Fund for the Figma Community, and why these additions are important for the next generation of the Figma Community. I’ve been thoroughly impressed with Figma’s openness to the community feedback while preparing this release, and Rogie’s advocacy for the needs of the design community.

Paid resources are finally available on Community! The days of dealing with license keys, paying through 3rd-party websites, and importing downloaded files are over. As a customer, you can try most resources before buying, and if something went wrong easily apply for a refund.

While this release makes the whole experience much smoother for end users, it’s a huge change for Community creators — ​“there’s no dealing with payment integrations, license keys, emailing files, or even managing refunds — just set your price, publish, and start earning”. A few years ago, I was delighted to learn that some creators earn a living from selling Figma plugins and resources. This will become much more common now because of additional exposure and a lower barrier to entry. There has never been a better time to start contributing to the design community.

If that game wasn’t enough, check out these spatial 3D animations made using SkewDat plugin. There is a tutorial as well.

Honestly, at this point, I gave up on trying to understand how Double Glitch creates their prototypes. All possible Tic Tac Toe moves were manually tied together in this prototype, which is an incredible amount of work. Make sure to get a copy of the file and look under the hood!

Luis shares a few tips on structuring library files. He recommends optimizing variants for searching and usage rather than maintenance, and suggests this file structure: Page → Section → Variant. Also, check out his other thread on naming and splitting your library files.

“This workshop will be a deep dive into the prototyping features in Figma. We will cover many of the basic frame-to-frame navigation prototypes for devices, and touch upon some of the more advanced capabilities that you can unlock with video, interactive components, and sections.”

“We will leverage Figma’s native prototyping capabilities to demonstrate how to collaboratively design slide decks, as well as utilize FigJam’s whiteboards to present ideas while others follow along and give feedback. You can use these techniques to give interactive presentations, engage your audience (or students), and communicate your content clearly and compellingly.”

“In this workshop we will cover how to apply motion and animation when prototyping with Figma. We will cover concepts like transitions, delays, timing, smart animate, and interactive components.”

In this series for educators and students, Miggi introduces Auto Layout features and covers best practices and tips for designing layouts that can change with their content.

Video and transcript of a fireside chat with Dylan Field on Figma’s origins, AI, and education.

Marcin Wichary leads the editor design team at Figma and wrote some of my favorite deep dives on design-related topics (like underlines on Medium or fonts and line height at Figma). Now he is working on a gorgeous book about keyboards, ​“covering 150 years from the early typewriters to the pixellated keyboards in our pockets.” Shift Happens (what a name!) has already become the #3 Kickstarter non-fiction book of all time, and seems like it’s on its way to a stretch goal, unlocking a larger 3rd volume. Highly recommend listening to his recent interview on the Design Details podcast about the book, its publication, website, and more. Consider backing this project by March 9, 2023 to help it reach a stretch goal.

A simple temperature prototype by Vijay Verma, made as a part of Figbruary.

Miggi shows how to use Figma sections for prototyping. Besides being a wonderful organizational tool, sections give you the ability to remember the states of areas of your prototype.

Patrick Morgan with shares simple guidelines for using Figma to showcase your strength as a visual storyteller.

While Figma doesn’t have native support for color tokens yet, Luis kicks off a discussion of how they might work in the future. His approach is similar to how I usually organize color tokens in CSS, so hopefully that will be the direction they take!

Jordan Singer and the Diagram team share the preview of Genius, their new tool for generating user interfaces with AI. ​“It understands what you’re designing and makes suggestions that autocomplete your design using components from your design system. It’s important to explore lots of ideas and iterate in the design process, and Genius ideates and iterates alongside you as you design.”

Designer Advocate Ana Boyer with great recommendations for reducing noodles, creating micro-interactions, and organizing separate designs into flows.