Uber took a programmatic approach to create 256 new components for map markers. ​“By automating the construction of the markers, I was able to avoid human-error and efficiently generate the full set of variants. Programmatically testing the components allowed me to thoroughly validate them under multiple scenarios and be confident of their quality.”

Netflix presents Hawkins, their design system widely used across the Netflix Studio’s growing application catalog, which consists of 80+ applications. In this blog post, they explain why Hawkins was built, how they got buy-in across the engineering organization, and what their plans are moving forward. (BTW, the cover illustration is made by Martin Bekerman, whose other artworks you can see below.)

The team at Microsoft published a v2 of the Fluent System Icons toolkit. New sizes are available, with over 4.5k icons per theme. The new icons are built with Variants, friendlier, have rounded corners and simplified shapes.

Polaris for Admin Web UI kit is focused on building and creating products for Shopify.

Two Dropbox employees joined forces to create an internal Figma workshop for all design-adjacent roles in the company. This blog post tells how the project came together and shares their slides as a Community resource.

Dropbox went fully remote last year, and in this post, they discuss changes to the workflow. ​“After migrating their design organization to Figma from Sketch back in 2018, the Dropbox design team had a head start when it came to remote collaboration. The team already had established best practices for virtually every stage of the creation process — brainstorming, wireframing, prototyping, and commenting. […] But once the pandemic hit and the team went fully remote, they needed to do more.”

“Unlocking collaboration is hard, especially for large remote teams. In this livestream, LinkedIn’s Renee Reid and GitHub’s Ash Guillaume share their insights and methodologies for creating collaborative and inclusive design processes.”

In this guest post Kylie Poppen, Design Lead at Google, shares a framework for thinking about the 90,000 hours that make up your career — whether you’re looking for a new role, hiring for your team, or just evaluating your next step.

Pinterest’s Ashley Seto and Fidelity Investments’ Taylor Cashdan and Mark Steinruck provide a behind the scenes look into their design systems and the operations that keep them going.

Another example from Spotify. Here, they moved from 36 to 4 track row components.

Carola Pescio Canale, Product Designer at Dropbox, shares a short list of her favorite tips and shortcuts to speed up Figma workflow.

Shopify used Variants to clean up their local design system for retail.

In this example, they replaced 105 button components with just 3. (Sounds like they’ve been using Variants for a while, as Dylan Field used Spotify design system Encore to present the feature in his Config keynote.)

Backstage is Spotify’s homegrown developer portal. This article shows how to design for it using a combination of Figma and Storybook.

Luis shows how converting the whole GitHub Primer buttons library to variants took less than a minute.

A new plugin from Microsoft to help you quickly annotate focus and tab order flow for keyboard and screen reader users.

A former designer at Lyft makes the case against using Figma in a large organization. Because Abstract uses a real Git repository to store Sketch files, it’s ​“allowing for a structured approach to file organization at a micro and macro level.” I’m not familiar with permissions on an Organization plan, but that sounds like a nightmare: “…imagine you have thousands of business-critical files shared by 250 designers all of which are editable by the whole team by default!”

The team members from Shopify, Condé Nast, and Harry’s shared their experiences creating multi-brand design systems in a livestream a few months ago. This post shares some of the highlights from it.

Jeremy Dizon discusses best practices that his team followed to create and maintain multiple Lyft Product Language component libraries in Figma.

Tobias Negele, a Staff Product Designer at Shopify, shares their approach and template for organizing files and creating a predictable structure that engineers and other colleagues can easily understand and navigate.