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.

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.

Luis with a cool technique for adding focus rings to a button using an absolutely positioned component instead of a shadow hack.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Fons Mans is back with a colorful poster tutorial.

Vijay Verma wraps up his Figbruary challenge with a full list of 28 experiments he made last month. 

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.

Ridd came up with a new tutorial on how to use Kernel for designing in Figma 10× faster with real data. Kernel is a new product that ​“makes it easy to generate and access the content you need so you can design faster than ever”, and connects Figma to other services like Notion, Airtable, Google Sheets, and OpenAI.

Dan Hollick with a fascinating thread on an optimal x‑height size and a visual arc.

Yuhki Yamashita’s talk from WebSummit 2022. I shared slides and an article based on this talk last November. In it, Yuhki explores how design is changing and how we need to change with it. He also offers practical advice on navigating our new always-in-progress world and Figma’s approach to developing collaboration features designed with that in mind.

Another project by Jon Moore, this time for planning your perfect home right in Figma. Hundreds of true-to-size objects for designing a spectacular space, also available as the imperial system version. Wish it was available a couple of months ago when I did something similar from scratch for a home project!