“The Microsoft Surface Duo Design Kit includes safe areas, design patterns & guidelines, dual screen postures, and components for designing Dual Screen apps that users love.” (The last link about Microsoft for now, I promise!)

Alek Mackie, a Senior Illustrator at Shopify, shares how he stays creative and productive.

“Windows 11 mockup is containing different frames created to give you the all-new Windows 11 feel.”

“In this episode, Charli talks with Sara Hill and Dan Ross product design leads at Shopify. They show off the evolution of the Shopify design system, how they’ve managed to scale it, and the challenges they faced along the way.”

Mariz Melo, a Lead Designer at Google, shows an update to their Figma components. Love the idea of keeping redlines for engineers as a component’s variant!

Josh Mateo, Design Systems Lead at Netflix: ​“Effectively scaling and extending a brand into a company’s product is a common challenge I’ve noticed throughout my career. If we deconstruct visual attributes and technical constraints into scalable elements, we can begin to influence the brand from the product, or vice-versa.”

“A template for the GV Brand Sprint – a workshop format conceived at Google Ventures and well documented by Jake Knapp. In 3 hours or less, you get a very good picture of a brand, its vision, future and challenges.”

A Figma template from Dropbox to help facilitate cross-functional collaboration across teams.

A new plugin by Metalab for dropping your designs into one of several hands in two easy steps.

“Growth Data Scientist Wendy Lu shares how an experiment to enable remote collaboration kicked off a larger workstream to understand changes in collaboration more broadly. We found that users are collaborating more across regions and time zones, designers are working more closely with their cross-functional colleagues, and people are starting to include collaborators earlier in the design process. Below, read more on our findings (and methodology), and see how these trends come to life at Atlassian and Dropbox.”

How Dropbox uses Figma’s Smart Animate feature to illustrate product design concepts.

“This file contains character stickersheets 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.”

“Design systems sit at the intersection of design and development. Lyft teammates Jeremy Dizon, Design Systems Product Designer, and Alex Lockwood, Design Systems Staff Engineer, will show off their design system and share how they collaborated to build it.”

Komal Javed from Shopify shows how to set up your Figma projects to meet the needs of your whole team. Project Index Template is available in Figma Community.

Luke Cardoni, UX Lead at REI, recently spent time improving the accessibility of form elements in their design system, Cedar. ​“It turned out that these UI components posed the perfect opportunity to start exploring Figma’s Variants feature, as each Text Input, Radio Button, and Checkbox has so many, well, variants.”

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.