Speaking of the font metrics, I’ve just bought the Martian Grotesk font family for the upcoming redesign of my personal website. Its author Roman Shamin put a great deal of work into making this font a fantastic choice for web and digital design — equal vertical metrics for perfect positioning inside a bounding box, glyph height sticking to the pixel grid at common sizes, case sensitivity, and a variable version. It’s one of the most thoughtfully made fonts for the UI work and currently it’s 60% off until September 4th. (See also his free open-source font Martian Mono.)

The Chrome Cast podcast interviews Noah Levin, the Director of Design at Figma. Besides talking about Figma and FigJam, they discuss Google for Education’s partnership with Figma to bring the collaborative design platform to education Chromebooks across the US and how Figma is leaning into the education space.

Anthony DiSpezio with a great tip on controlling opacity and zoom level with the number keys.

Patrick Morgan asked designers about their favorite Figma shortcuts and shares the top 10 recommendations based on 220+ responses.

Molly Hellmuth gives a few practical recommendations on creating a bulletproof color system.

Christine Vallaure highlights some of Figma’s features and possibilities to help you build a design that aligns with code as much as needed and improve your teamwork.

Molly Hellmuth shares a few things she learned about using Component Properties after rebuilding a design system from scratch.

“Cloud 100 leaders from Algolia, Figma, Gong​.io, and Papaya Global share their stories from the trenches as they offer both strategic and tactical advice to founders on building enduring businesses.”

To celebrate 10 years of Figma, Dylan Field shares 10 physical objects from Figma’s history that are special to him. The beta notebook and WebGL coffee table are my favorites!

The founder of Cron wondered about this question, and Figma’s Design Director Noah Levin came up with some great links in replies.

Ridd finally launched his YouTube channel! That’s an instant-subscribe. There are already a bunch of great videos, including the latest on building a product design inspiration database in Notion. See also his best practices for component properties.

Luis Ouriach walks through updates to the design system structure recommended by Figma Advocates.

Miguel with a few useful shortcuts for adjusting font size, weight, letter spacing, and line height.

Bonnie Kate Wolf designs pictograms for Netflix in Figma.

Annotation is a lot smoother with Pencil strokes no longer getting clipped or disturbing Auto Layout in frames. See also Marcin Wichary’s short thread on how they got to this solution.

Rogie comes to the rescue and explains how to preserve a fill color when icons are overridden and swapped. It’s worth keeping a layer name consistent across icons in the library if you plan to use them in different colors.

Miggi with a mind-blowing trick for selecting items inside of the tight spots.

Zander Whitehurst shows how to create a cool interactive carousel in Figma. See also his quick video ​“Wireframe to Landing page” where he uses that carousel in a landing page design.

The fresh look of the Figma Community with improved search and a new browsing experience makes it easier to discover and differentiate between categories like product (Figma or FigJam), use cases (like design systems), and resources (widgets or plugins).

Miggi shows how to create a FigJam file, maximize the FigJam collaboration features, navigate the FigJam toolbar, add text, images, and stickers to your file, use sections for organization, and finally, how to invite others to your FigJam file.