Joey Banks is back with a bit of advice on his new approach to using Auto Layout for building responsive components. ​“With my approach today, I first like to drag out an unfinished component instance and stretch it in bizarre and unexpected ways to see what happens. If I can make this component work as expected in the strangest sizes, I’ll feel confident that it’ll work for nearly all situations.”

Dylan Field shares his thoughts on ​“Neopets, early MySpace collabs with Eric Lu, the importance of asking ​‘why now’ when building new products, the future of web development and the future”.

Rogie’s plugin for generating tiling noise and textures for fills and strokes is finally out of beta and publicly available. It’s essential for any illustration or art work. Check out a video walkthrough and upvote it on ProductHunt.

“Prototyping in Figma just got an update. In this livestream, Designer Advocate Ana Boyer and Product Designer Nikolas Klein will walk you through adding videos to prototypes, how to build and edit multi-flow prototypes, faster, and demonstrate how to bring others along. Community members Mirko Santangelo and Jannis Smesny will also join to demo how they use the new features.”

An interview with Jordan Singer from Diagram, who built Magician and participated in the text review API beta, exploring what this API enables and sharing tips on navigating the ​“untapped intersection of product design and AI.”

I shared Magician before, but in Jordan’s own words it’s ​“a design tool for Figma made by Diagram that introduces AI into designer workflows to expand your creativity and imagination as you design. It’s a magical utility that works alongside you to help ideate and inspire you with new ideas, whether it’s generating never-before-seen icons, imagery to use in your designs, or help with writer’s block.”

Great team activity from Miggie — build a gingerbread house using the provided virtual gingerbread cookies and sweets. In the end, you can even make your own card.

Joey Banks published an update to his file thumbnail UI kit with dozens of custom combinations, and now even easier to edit with component properties.

Ana and Miggie are back streaming their experiments with Figma prototypes. This time they cover drag interactions and video among other things.

Molly Hellmuth shares common mistakes that many of her students make when building their first design system, from overusing component sets and styles to mismanaging icons and making every component public.

Framer and Fons Mans teamed up to create an advent calendar of design gifts, from heavily discounted apps to free icon & wallpaper packs. So far they’ve offered big discounts on Sketch and Campsite subscriptions, as well as a free typeface from The Pangram Pangram Foundry.

A new product by Jordan Singer and Diagram, who you might remember from Automator and Prototyper. Magician is a Figma plugin that lets you design with the power of AI to do everything from copywriting to generating unique icons from the text. Currently in beta with three available ​“magic spells” for creating icons, writing copy, and generating images.

Vijay’s roundup of special effects achieved with Rogie’s new Noise & Texture plugin. Don’t miss his Twitter thread with some context and details.

After following Vijay’s work for a few years, I enjoyed reading this interview and learning about the man behind the art. He speaks about his background, using Figma for realistic illustrations, and his creative process.

In Issue 89, I shared slides for Yuhki Yamashita’s talk ​“Confessions of modern design” on how design is changing, and how we need to change with it. This article summarizes his advice on navigating our new always-in-progress world and Figma’s approach to developing collaboration features designed with that in mind.

Vijay is experimenting with inner shadows in Figma. Despite a limit of only 8 shadows, it’s usually enough to create a 3D effect on any shape.

A Twitch stream of Ana Boyer and Miggi Cardona diving deep into Figma prototyping.

Ridd explains why it’s better to think of each container component as having a single slot instead of a bunch of individual slots.

Lenny Rachitsky kicked off a new series on building products by interviewing Figma’s CPO Yuhki Yamashita. Learn about their planning process, how they use OKRs, their design review meetings process, org structure, lessons learned, and more in this Twitter thread, or in an excerpt from his subscriber-only newsletter.

Marcin Wichary introduces twelve editor improvements. Numeric scaling is the obvious highlight and something many of us have been waiting for, but a new dialog for creating Styles and preserved formatting when copying/​pasting text are great too!

Steve Schoger with a new step-by-step tutorial. See also another one on drawing a briefcase.