Fascinating thread showing how countless experiments with Figma plugins and API finally led to the development of Automator. This thread was published in March, and two months later today, Jordan announced a $3M seed round for his company — can’t wait to see what he will build next!

Nice trick on using ​“after delay” animation in combination with a Lottie file to avoid an infinite animation loop and play it only once.

Ridd discusses a few key principles for using base components: How often are you iterating on the component? How complex is it? Avoiding problems with Interactive Components. Pairing primitives with slots. Bringing in base components early on to speed up the process.

Joey Banks shares how he typically names Variants in Figma and the approach he tries to take whenever he is feeling stuck.

What a great idea to let community members nominate their favorite resources. Looking forward to see the winners on May 11th at Config!

Dylan Field shared three steps that Figma takes to become a more global company. First, Figma incorporated in Japan, set up an office in Tokyo, and started working on localizing Figma into Japanese. Second, they’re expanding in EMEA by opening offices in Paris and Berlin. And last but not least, Figma finally added support for RTL languages! Great news for designers working with Arabic, Hebrew, and Urdu who relied on 3rd-party plugins in the past. See thread by Lauren Budorick on why implementing RTL support was a huge undertaking.

Another drawing challenge from Miguel. Love the simplicity of his approach and how well the icon has turned out. 

How would you create a spiral in Figma without any external tools? Miggi’s answer is in the thread, but some of the solutions from others are really smart and creative too!

Joey Banks talks about his approach to organizing and naming in Figma.

Bruno Figueiredo talks to Miguel Cardona about his journey to the world of design, work at Figma, and design education.

An official Community resource for the popular Automator plugin. Explore automations made by the community and remix them to work best for you.

Fons Mans recreated the latest designs from Apple, Instagram, and Shopify in Figma. Great educational resource.

Super useful tip from Miguel — use Option‑W/​A/​S/​D shortcuts (which you may know from gaming) to align elements or points in vector networks. The latter is going to be a massive time-saver for me!

Miggi shows his process of writing in small chunks using FigJam. Love how flexible and multi-faceted this product is!

A curated list of automations for Jordan Singer’s popular Automator plugin.

Yet another great tutorial breaking down the process of creating an artwork by Fons Mans.

Automator – the most discussed plugin lately – is now available to the public. For a limited time, it’s $29 per year for personal use. See Issue #52 for some examples of what it can do.

A really detailed guide by Molly Hellmuth on spacing and layout grid best practices based on Material Design, Bootstrap, and Figma.

Fons Mans started publishing step-by-step tutorials for creating some of his artworks. See also a couple of other — one and two.

Joey Banks shared a change in his approach to base components earlier this month on Twitter, and now goes into more details in his newsletter. I often end up with too much complexity because of over-reliance on base components, so this is a piece of welcome advice.