Bruno Figueiredo, a Community Advocate for Figma in Portugal, came up with a fun community project — ​“lets all record our journeys from all across the globe heading into San Francisco. It doesn’t need to be perfect or look cinematic. Just grab your phone or camera and record the fun moments, the packing, the ride to the airport or the flight, the registration… all the little bits up until the moment the conference is about to start.” Can’t wait to see the end result!

A guest post in Lenny Rachitsky’s newsletter by Figma VP of Product Sho Kuwamoto on the importance of feel, service, and staying close to customers. ​“Fast-forward to 2023, and Figma has grown beyond what I could have imagined. It’s gotten to the point where people often ask me for advice on how to prioritize features or how to run a product process. These questions are hard for me to answer, because I don’t think we do anything special. Our process is messy and we make mistakes. We create designs and then throw them away. We miscommunicate all the time and forget to write things down.”

Jan Toman gathered the best practices for creating solid button components.

Designer Advocate Mal shows how to use the new memory control features: ​“To keep you informed of your memory usage, and any potential issues that may arise, we’ve adjusted our memory banners and alerts to live in the sidebar along with your pages and layers. We’ve also introduced a Memory use tool to surface memory consumed in your files by Page Content and Imported Components as well as the ability to show memory usage in the layers panel for all layers.”

State management is now standardized for prototypes using interactive components, scrolling, and video so that Figma can memorize the state, share it across the frames, and offer a way to reset. See a deep dive by noodles expert Niko on how to use the new features. (Also, this is my kind of joke.)

Mal with a quick demo of Shaper, Magic Marker, and A Selector plugins.

Molly Hellmuth shares her favorite tips from the ​“Figma like the Pro’s” series — editing Auto Layout directly on the frame, using Constraints with Grids, deleting and healing vectors, using Auto Layout as an organizing tool, and copying links to specific pages, frames, or sections.

In this Study Hall, Miggi shows how to make Interactive Component carousel galleries.

A useful freebie from Luis Ouriach — 360 badges, pills, and tags in the full-color palette range.

Fascinating comments from Sho Kuwamoto, Figma’s VP of Product, on how plugins are implemented. Each plugin runs in a security sandbox — ​“We actually took a JavaScript VM, compiled it down to WebAssembly, and then we run that VM inside of the browser. So it’s a completely separate engine than the native JS engine. For security reasons, we don’t want two scripts running inside that VM, because then the two scripts could potentially have access to each other. And we don’t want to run two instances of this VM, for memory reasons.” 🤯

In this video, Darshan Gajara from Consistent Creators podcast talks to Designer Advocate Luis Ouriach about his role at Figma, overcoming burnout, building an audience, and the breakdown of his viral Twitter threads.

Great examples of automating grunt work with the Automator plugin.

A simple but fun technique for creating cool animations with mirrored components.

Ridd just launched Deep Dives, ​“a new interview series full of stories and advice to help you take a huge leap forward in your career”. In the first episode, Joey Banks gives an in-depth look at what it’s like to lead design systems at Twitter and Webflow, shares his strategies for structuring component libraries, working efficiently in Figma, and even keeping up with all of the latest plugins and tooling.

A set of social widgets for Bento with a little extra depth from Double Glitch.

A quick demo of the sticky scroll feature introduced as part of the recent Little Big Updates.

Lauren shows how to create a micro animation (also known as micro interaction) using a heart icon. These interactions add a really fun touch, and I love that the tutorial uses a heart icon from another tutorial by Miggi.

Lauren Andres discovers an older feature ​“delete and heal” to create smoother vector lines.

Fons Mans is back with a new tutorial on how to create a glowing glass effect in Figma.

A good tip from Jan Toman on color-coding different types of components inside a Figma library, which allows everyone to identify the component’s source and set the right expectations from these components.