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.

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

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.

Molly Hellmuth explains how to build the perfect combo button that contains two actions in one component, each with independent states and resizing behaviors. This button allows designers to combine related actions, saving space and simplifying designs.

Seems like Figma reversed the original policy prohibiting third-party payment tools and delayed the launch of the paid resources in the Community until March 7th. While I believe Figma’s 15% fee for covering transactional costs and acting as the merchant of record is very fair, I applaud their flexibility and openness to community feedback. (Historically, Gumroad was one of the most popular platforms for selling digital products, but with their recent price increase I don’t know why would anyone go with them instead of a built-in community marketplace.)

If you ever wonder what Designer Advocates do at Figma, Clara Ujiie just gave a mini-presentation to Figma interns answering this question. While community engagement is the most visible part of advocates’ jobs, they also spend a lot of time on customer education and learning how customers and the community use Figma.

A new plugin by Vijay Verma: ​“The plugin utilizes the Metavatar algorithm to create stunning gradient backgrounds in a variety of cool colors. It also has the added feature of adding noise to make the gradients even more visually striking.”

Well, now we all know how to refer to the Auto Layout alignment control.

Essential list for any card-carrying Figma professional.

A new project by Vijay Verma: ​“Figbruary is a fictional month created by combining Figma + February where you can experiment and design things daily to push the limits. For every 24 hour day within this 672 hour timespan of the month, we have prepared a prompt with instructions for you to design and create.”

See the past submissions on Twitter, like this weather icon made with only primitive shapes.

Sean Whitney, Craft Ventures investor and early Figma team member, sat down with Toni Gemayel, Figma’s first growth marketer, to talk about how he scaled growth marketing at Figma. While at Figma, Toni launched their Design Systems website, built an experimental Variable Fonts plugin before the native support was shipped, and was heavily involved with the design community.

Luis Ouriach wrote a massive multi-part guide on structuring teams, organizing projects, and managing files in Figma.

Epic thread by Molly Hellmuth on the best practices for using property, variant, and Auto Layout features. She just rebuilt her popular UI Prep design system with the latest Figma features and learned a lot in the process.

MDS with a new live redesign process video from Shift Nudge curriculum on density and style. 

Clara Ujiie came up with a simple workflow for visually testing components. (The same tutorial is available as a Twitter thread, if that’s your jam.)