MDS is killing it with a killer Auto Layout tutorial. Who cares if it’s a bit late for Halloween!

Vijay keeps teasing Rogie’s new plugin Noise & Texture. You’ll notice that it’s currently in beta and requires a code to unlock, but if you look closely at this thread you may find one.

Nilay Patel from The Verge interviews Dylan Field for the Decoder podcast. It’s the longest and sharpest interview since the acquisition — an absolute must-read. ​“So I wanted to talk to Dylan about the deal, why he’s doing it, how he made the decision to sell, and what things he can do as part of Adobe that he couldn’t do as an independent company. Dylan’s also a pretty expansive thinker, so after we talked about his company getting the ​“fuck you” money from Adobe, we talked about making VR Figma for the metaverse and AGI, which is artificial general intelligence, or the kind of AI that can fully think for itself.”

Slides from Figma’s Chief Product Officer Yuhki Yamashita talk at Web Summit on ​“how design is changing, and how we need to change with it”. Hope the video will become available one day, as it’s a really interesting take on the modern design and development process.

Steve Schoger shows how to draw a fingerprint icon using the full power of Figma’s vector networks.

As always, Vijay Verma pushes the limits of Figma with a fun experiment based on Auto Layout and an animated prototype. Great to see how easy it was to build and control.

Clara Ujiie with a nifty FigJam trick.

Gleb Sabirzyanov suggests a few approaches for fixing broken vector paths and shapes.

This week, Designer Advocate Mal talks about Taylor Swift Midnights Cover Template, Halloween Retrospective Template, Hidden Kittens, and Calendar.

Not sure if this is new but super handy for those of us using Figma for presentations!

Copy-pasting objects from FigJam to Figma never disappoints.

Noah Levin talks about Figma’s unique processes in hiring and culture on the Design To Be podcast.

Luis shows some of the original designs for the component icon by Rasmus Andersson. At this point, it’s hard to imagine anything other than ❖, but I also like #7 and #14.

Miggi shows how to do hanging opening quotes with Auto Layout.

Ridd shows how to use the new beta to expose the subcomponent state, avoid breaking down components, and set preferred values for ​“slots”.

With the recent improvements to variants and components, Ridd makes a point that the benefits of using base components are no longer worth the cost for the design systems work. That said, they’re still great for exploratory work.

Designer Advocate Mal shares one hot community file, plugin, and widget.

An interesting comment from Rasmus Andersson on how the design team at Figma works. Many people get anxious when collaborators or viewers appear in their files in the middle of work. There must be a better way than moving files between private Drafts and public files. (Personally, I’d love to see something similar to the git push command developers use — privately work on changes, then when you’re ready send them to the public file. This would obviously affect multi-player collaboration, but sounds like an interesting challenge to think about.)

An interesting technique from Luis on using component props for adding spacing around icons only in some instances, for example when used inside a button.

At the recent All-Hands call Sho Kuwamoto confirmed that Figma is working on design tokens. Schema Conference seems to be a perfect moment to announce them, so fingers crossed!