Christine Vallaure shares an updated list of her old favorites and plenty of new tips, highlighting what you might have missed when working with components in Figma. (Thanks for the friend link!)

Ridd on two big issues and two opportunities of designing with AI: ​“If I’m in my design tool it’s because something is in my brain (even if it’s just a simple sketch). That’s why I don’t buy the so-called ​“blank canvas problem” as a real pain point for professional designers. Pointing AI at this ​“problem” is really a way to expand the user base by lowering the bar for non-designers to participate.”

Happy birthday to my favorite design tool!

There are three simple ingredients of a realistic illustration: gradients, shadows, and noise. Vijay makes it look so easy!

Luis shows where styles and variables can be used in the Figma UI.

Miggi explains how to control the behavior of text fields with visual and keyboard shortcuts without touching the auto width/​height or fixed size controls in the Design panel.

This is a topic near and dear to my heart. Ana discusses the benefits of using color scales — consistency, accessibility, and efficiency.

Ana Boyer on creating a component API — a process of defining how you will approach constructing and naming your components across all of your libraries and documentation that will be consumed by your design and engineering teams.

The Yo! Podcast by Rob Hope is one of my favorite shows. In this wrap-up of Season 3, Rob talks to Pablo Stanley: ​“Pablo Stanley is a designer, artist, and musician based in Mexico. We discuss the creative side of his childhood gang, the importance of having fun with your team, why he left the Roboto NFT community, monetizing his AI stock site, and the importance of details in all aspects of design.”

Speaking of design conferences, the GitHub Design team recently held its second internal design conference, LGTM. You can watch talks from last year in the YouTube playlist, but a couple of this year’s talks have already been published as well — ​“Who is the We in the How Might We” on building trust and ​“Async/​Await” on close collaboration across non-overlapping time zones.

On September 20th, the Portugal chapter of Friends of Figma organizes a free full-day hybrid conference for the community by the community. ​“Expect talks and workshops on the Future of Design, DesignOPS, Design Systems, Creativity and, as always, a lot of amazing Figma tips as tricks.” All talks will be streamed, but I wish I could attend the in-person event in Lisbon!

“SVG Pattern Builder allows you to create, customize, and download unique animated SVG patterns for your web and design projects. Great for Figma, Framer, Webflow and video projects.” Made by Meng To from Design Code with a lot of help from Claude AI.

A behind-the-scenes look into the journey of launching Figma Slides. As Mihika noted, this talk could be considered the other half of her podcast with Lenny on building zero-to-one products from a few months ago.

Miggi applies the new ​“Remove background” AI feature, a vector mask outlining the shape, a hidden ​“Show mask outlines” command (that I didn’t know about!), and a simple prototype to create a popping out head avatar.

A 7‑minute tutorial from Miggi on using the new Suggest Auto Layout and the AI features ​“Rewrite this,” ​“Replace content,” and ​“Rename layers.” 

Luis on the power of efficient aliasing when building typographic styles from primitives.

Minimize or hide the new UI to regain more screen real estate as you work.

A quick tip from Miggi on using grids to generate type scale and place graphics.

Ana Boyer helps design system teams ensure designers get library updates not by copying main components into their working files.

A retrospective on an issue with Make Designs from Noah Levin, a VP of Design at Figma. First, a reminder on how the feature works: “[…] Make Designs feature employs three parts: a model, some context, and a prompt. This feature currently uses a collection of off-the-shelf models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Amazon’s Titan model—the same generally available models that anyone can use—and we have not done any additional training or fine-tuning. To give the model enough freedom to compose designs from a wide variety of domains, we commissioned two extensive design systems (one for mobile and one for desktop) with hundreds of components, as well as examples of different ways these components can be assembled to guide the output.”

What went wrong: ​“We carefully reviewed the underlying design systems throughout the course of development and during a private beta. But in the week leading up to Config, new components and example screens were added that we simply didn’t vet carefully enough. A few of those assets were similar to aspects of real world applications, and appeared in the output of the feature with certain prompts.”