Casey Newton interviews Dylan Field about antitrust issues, keeping control of his product road map, and whatever DALL‑E and other AI tools might mean for the future of design.

Web design meets e‑sports in a live Figma Arena. Inspired by Layer Tennis, this is a 1‑on‑1 tournament where players have 30 mins to come up with a design based on the brief provided during the stream. The audience votes to decide the winner.

Sho Kuwamoto describes how the editor team works. Building the process around ​“What do our users want us to make better?” instead of self-centered questions is probably what makes Figma so magical.

Luis shares jumping-off points for starting a new design system in Figma.

Vijay Verma shares a few techniques for adding simple halftone effects in Figma. See also his experiments with Rogie’s upcoming NT plugin and how he achieved a frosted glass effect.

Ridd with a pro tip on using Variants. Good prep work for the design tokens in the future!

A piece on why businesses should adopt a design-centric mindset to ensure success, with commentary by Nikolas Klein, Product Designer at Figma since 2018.

Molly Hellmuth with a detailed walkthrough of beta features and why they’re worth using right away.

Joey Banks explains why new features are so important for the design systems’ work.

Sho Kuwamoto, Director of Product at Figma, on new features and applying the concept of ​“composition” from engineering to design systems.

Vijay Verma with a gorgeous poster for Pixar’s upcoming Elemental movie. See the file and techniques he used in a thread.

Fons Mans shows how to create rich gradients without any plugins — like this one, for example.

Luis on why it’s important to optimize for the usage of components.

MDS with another take on Figma/​Adobe: ​“The magic happens in the details and typically in things that you didn’t plan for”.

Andrei Herasimchuk, the ex-Lead Designer at Adobe, shares a list of ​“big wins” and ​“small wins” that Figma cofounders and he wrote down in December 2013. Pretty amazing to see how almost all of it is a reality now. (“Modernizing masking & gradient UI” sounds pretty sweet though!)

Adobe representative to Protocol: ​“While we have been reducing our investment in XD, we will continue to support it. We are excited about Figma’s vision for the future of product design and the potential of our teams coming together to benefit our customers. After the transaction closes (expected in 2023), we will share more information.” RIP XD.

Adam Nash, one of the early investors in Figma, remembers his conversation with Dylan Field in 2013 about WebGL and moving graphic design to the cloud: ​“Dylan was not deterred. He explained that the heavy compute was the exact reason why moving to the cloud made sense. By providing high powered machines in the cloud, anyone could get access to an almost arbitrary amount of power without spending $10K, and latency & bandwidth had progressed to the point where shipping the UI bits to the client was a solved problem.”

The official announcement from Dylan Field.

A super useful tip by Miggi. The power of combining FigJam with Figma always keeps surprising me.

Clara Ujiie shows how to archive your work using pages and version history.