“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.

Kelly Gorr and Prasanna Gunuru, Microsoft. ​“Figma is a powerful design tool that is used by many designers across Microsoft. Building custom Figma plugins can unlock new capabilities, resources, and shortcuts that are tailored to enhance design processes. Kelly and Prasanna take you through what it’s like building Figma plugins and how they are used at Microsoft.”

Ivy Knight and Rody Davis, Google. ​“Material You is enabling a new level of individuality across interfaces. But how does dynamic color interact with the distinct brand expression in your design system? In this session, we’ll dive into the NEW Figma plugin for generating dynamic color schemes and see those changes reflected throughout your app’s UI.”

Jeremy Dizon, Runi Goswami, Michael Yom, and Joanne Deng from Lyft. ​“Like any product, a design system is only as useful as it is usable. In this session, the Lyft Design Systems team will share the end-to-end resources that enable their system users to build consistent, quality products and features at scale. We’ll learn about their most resilient processes, their past mistakes, their new-ish contribution model, and more.”

Jennie Yip, Atlassian. ​“Design systems have evolved into robust ecosystems of interconnected tooling, documentation, conceptual models, and more. We’re excited to bring you on a journey to celebrate and reflect on the past decade as we shift our mindsets, apply systems thinking, take on the monster of scale, and embrace the complexity of ​“platform.””

Jen Yee and Luca Orio, Netflix. ​“Jen and Luca will reveal how systems and freedoms can coexist and how your design community can thrive at any stage. Letting go of consistency and control might sound scary, but embracing a culture of context and trust is the key to supporting an ecosystem where collaborative creation can truly fuel innovation.”

This file contains character sticker sheets and illustrations from Microsoft Inclusive Design’s toolkit. They are commonly used when referencing Microsoft’s Inclusive Design methodology and the diversity in human abilities and preferences.