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 press release from Adobe. ​“Adobe and Figma will benefit all stakeholders in the product design process, from designers to product managers to developers, by bringing powerful capabilities from Adobe’s imaging, photography, illustration, video, 3D and font technology into the Figma platform. […] The transaction is expected to close in 2023, subject to the receipt of required regulatory clearances and approvals and the satisfaction of other closing conditions, including the approval of Figma’s stockholders.” See also Adobe’s Investor presentation on acquisition.

The official announcement from Dylan Field.

The design team at Spotify discusses balancing conflicting goals of creating a playful space for experimentation and fostering interdisciplinary team collaboration in the Figma files. The key to achieving both is balancing the exploratory nature of design with a logical organization in your shared work. ​“A chaotic mess of brilliant designs is incomprehensible without a helpful file structure but too much structure early on might stifle your team’s inspiration.”

Beautiful demo of a powerful animation plugin Aninix.

The makers of the Aninix plugin explain animation timing in this detailed Twitter thread.

At Microsoft, Figma is winning over Adobe XD as their design tool of choice. Jordan Novet wrote an interesting profile for CNBC showing how several acquisitions and internal demand led to its rise in popularity, even while Microsoft and Adobe have worked together for over 20 years.

“The Figma app allows your team to riff on ideas together in real-time, present designs to get stakeholder feedback, and share the latest updates with everyone — without ever leaving Microsoft Teams.” See also the conversation with Jon Friedman, Corporate VP of Design & Research at Microsoft, about collaboration, the importance of design systems and toolchains in freeing up time for ambitious work, and why it’s worth it to change a company’s culture — even if it’s hard.

Microsoft Design refreshed their entire library of Fluent Emojis last year, and now they’re open-sourcing them on Figma Community (see also parts 2 and 3) and GitHub. A staggering amount of work went into this set of 1,538 emojis and it’s definitely worth exploring. Every icon is available in multiple variants — 3D, flat, and high contrast. Beautiful work!

Bonnie Kate Wolf designs pictograms for Netflix in Figma.

Figma launched a partnership with Google for Education to bring Figma and FigJam directly to Chromebooks, the most popular personal computing device for students. This is a huge opportunity for students to learn the same app used by professional designers. (That said, I still warmly remember days of using keygens with Photoshop 4.)

“Check out our nine Google Fonts pairings and start using them in your design projects. The pairings are hand-picked from Google Fonts catalog and open-sourced for everyone to use.”

José Torre, Staff Product Designer at Shopify, gave a Config talk about getting the most out of design systems. The article he published earlier this year is a great summary of his thoughts on this topic.

Nice write-up on how Spotify updated their icon system and streamlined the contribution flow with Figma. Shaun Bent shares a few more details in his Twitter thread.

Jan Six is a Product Designer at GitHub and author of the Figma Tokens plugin. In this talk, he shows a few plugins he built to speed up his own design workflow.

Josh Cusick shares how the Design Systems team at Microsoft built, maintained, and set up for people to contribute the Figma UI kit for Teams Component Libraries (TCL). He covers structuring pages, naming things, aligning with code, design tokens, and version control.

The Material 3 Design Kit provides a comprehensive introduction to the design system, with styles and components to help you get started.

Announced at Schema 2021, this is a new tool that helps you visualize Material You’s dynamic color and create a custom Material Design 3 theme. With built-in code export, it’s easy to migrate to Material’s new color system and take advantage of dynamic color. Don’t miss the article Introducing Material Theme Builder.

Jan Six, Sr. Product Designer at GitHub, talks about creating a design tokens system in Figma. See also his plugin Design Tokens below.

Google’s Material Design is teaming up with Figma to bring great UI from design to code: ​“Our design to code workflow allows teams to create UI components in Figma and export them in a portable container we call a UI Package. These Packages can be directly used in Jetpack Compose projects for Android applications, can be edited in Figma, and can be directly updated in code with good developer ergonomics for component reuse and change management.” Don’t miss the video from Android Developer Summit with a new workflow.