Regardless of going to the in-person Config this summer, this is a great intro of the international designer advocate team. Here is the full list for you to follow — Lauren Andres, Hugo Raymond, Hiroki Tani, Julia Kestner, Mallory Dean, Corey Lee, Alexia Danton, and Sebastian Metel.
A little nervous to come to Config without knowing anyone? FEAR NO MORE! The designer advocate team @figma is here for you. Some of us made a lil intro so you have friendly faces in June. 🫰 pic.twitter.com/fDXzM48msC
— Mal (see u at config) (@mdeandesign) April 27, 2023
The new plugin by Meng To uses AI to upscale up to 8X the original resolution. Perfect for a variety of images including avatars, background images, Midjourney renders, and marketing images. (Interesting that the author heavily relied on ChatGPT 4 to build it.)
The recording of Miggi’s workshop livestream on using vector tools in Figma.
A pack from Double Glitch with a collection of pre-made text effects that you can apply to your designs with just a few clicks. Reminds me of the good ol’ days of downloadable Photoshop actions. While the pack is commercial, I suggest checking out a free demo in the Community and watching a screencast.
Christine Vallaure shares a few practical prototyping techniques and advanced tips & tricks. They include using Auto Layout with Smart Animate, stateful transitions with sections, nesting prototypes, interactive components, and more. This video is also available as an article.
Amazing intro video of the 5x faster comment replies in the updated mobile apps. See also the comparison of performance before and after this release.
How do you do, fellow kids?
— Hugo (@_hraymond) April 11, 2023
A whole bunch of improvements have dropped on the @figma Mobile App, one of which is a much quicker way to react and reply to comments, check it out!https://t.co/CthBTjbrr8 pic.twitter.com/cv3PNQE9Sy
So happy to see that this geeky tool hit 2nd place as a Product of the Day at ProductHunt last week! Its author Roman Shamin collaborated with me on Accessible Palette in the past and built a few other projects featured in this newsletter. While the UI of the color picker may seem complicated at first, its guiding principle was educating and demonstrating new concepts underlying the OKLCH and LCH color spaces. It’s my go-to tool for working with these color spaces and wide-gamut P3 colors.
For additional context, see an in-depth article OKLCH in CSS: why we moved from RGB and HSL by Roman’s co-author on using OKLCH color space in code, as well as my article Accessible Palette: stop using HSL for color systems on using perceptually uniform color spaces as a foundation for design systems.
In this Study Hall, Miggi covers several ways to add/edit images in Figma and demonstrates how to upload a video to use when prototyping or presenting.
All-in-one free and open-source wireframe kit for quickly designing and prototyping ideas by Vijay Verma. The library contains more than 250+ components supporting dark mode and 150+ ready-to-use mobile screens.
So many great ways to warm up the room in replies to Femke. I’d love to try This or That, play two truths and a lie, draw blind contour portraits, or look for common ground with my team.
What are your favourite icrebreakers or games in Figjam to help warm up the room?
— femke (@femkesvs) April 3, 2023
Luis with a cool technique for adding focus rings to a button using an absolutely positioned component instead of a shadow hack.
Quick tip on creating proper focus rings on components ❖
— luis. (@disco_lu) April 4, 2023
Set up a "focus ring" component, and then use absolute positioning, combined with left/right and top/bottom constraints to make it stick to the edges
Bye bye to shadow hacks 👋 pic.twitter.com/khTfVY5IBa
Molly Hellmuth shares the top 10 places where her students get stuck when building their first design system in Figma. Many of those involve tactics that once were considered best practices but got depreciated by newer features and approaches. Her answers to the tricky questions come from a ton of knowledge and experience.
💡 Top 10 places my students get stuck when building their first design system in Figma.
— Molly Hellmuth (@molly_hellmuth) April 7, 2023
Keep reading for their questions & my answers.. pic.twitter.com/w1H7US13Dh
While I don’t often prototype interactions, I love the demo of all the use cases in this thread by Ana Boyer! Engineer Jediah Katz is also dropping some tips and tricks and Zander Whitehurst made a cool demo. Don’t miss the sticky scrolling playground file as well.
I don't know about you, but I was SO EXCITED to learn that Sticky Scroll is part of @figma's Little Big Updates:
— Ana Boyer (@_AnaBoyer) March 28, 2023
For context, sticky scroll allows you to stick a nested element to the top of a frame when you vertically scroll. Some great use cases include: https://t.co/ma9OVMM6Qi
Now you can align layers with layers inside a component instance. Check out the thread by Tom Lowry and don’t miss his detailed spec for different scenarios!
18/32 Align to nested instances
— Figma (@figma) March 28, 2023
Now you can select layers to align to nested instance sublayers. pic.twitter.com/WTiPisRhLW
Honestly, I always assumed that SVG bugs are just a part of the game and will always be here — not a surprising conclusion when 49% of imported SVGs relied on buggy features. In retrospect, it was a silly assumption considering SVG is one of only a few open vector formats. In this fantastic thread, Figma engineer Lauren Budorick shows how much work went into detecting, analyzing, and fixing these bugs. I didn’t realize that luminance mask support was a part of this work as well, and Miggi is already exploring creative applications for composited motion visuals in prototypes.
Last spring my team at @figma finally took on an area that we've known has been a huge pain point for a long time: SVG imports. We would soon find out just how bad it was (bad!) and that we’d need to build a whole new feature in the process.
— Lauren Budorick (@lbudorick) March 28, 2023
Meng To published a set of gorgeous handcrafted 8K wallpapers generated from 3D.
Jordan Singer shares what Diagram learned from participating in OpenAI Converge with early access to GPT‑4 and how they’re using it in Magician and Genius plugins.
as part of @OpenAI’s Converge we’ve been building AI design tools with access to GPT-4 @diagram over the past few months
— jordan singer (@jsngr) March 14, 2023
here’s what we’ve learned and how we’re using it 👇 pic.twitter.com/sSHUympi46
Fons Mans is back with a colorful poster tutorial.
Tutorial Thread!✨
— 10X Designers (@10x_designers) March 14, 2023
Learn how to create this colorfull poster with @figma in just a few easy steps.
Let’s dive in 👇 pic.twitter.com/u1GdVXVDvG
Vijay Verma wraps up his Figbruary challenge with a full list of 28 experiments he made last month.
It's Figma Friday Fun 😍
— vijay verma (@realvjy) March 17, 2023
From creating simple illustration to animation and faking 3D rocket in the space. Sharing all 28 @figma experiments with community file here ↓↓ pic.twitter.com/CnLUJ9JI5T
Luis keeps digging into different ways of structuring Figma libraries and styles. In this thread, he thinks through naming conventions on styles and explores the pros and cons of more abstract and specific naming conventions.
Here's another thread about managing Figma styles 🗂
— luis. (@disco_lu) March 16, 2023
It's pretty hard to know how far to push naming conventions on styles, and you can end up in some heavily nested folder structures if you're not careful
So let's take one component and work it out! pic.twitter.com/cO30LFzAd8