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.

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.