Hatch Design Talks podcast interviews Julia Kestner, Manager Designer Advocate at Figma. With Figma being in the hypergrowth phase and expanding in Europe, her job comes with exciting new challenges. The host spoke with Julia about the role of the Designer Advocate, the dangers of becoming too precious with one’s design system, and what we can expect now that Figma is putting more resources in Europe.

Luis Ouriach walks through updates to the design system structure recommended by Figma Advocates.

Lingo provides an easy-to-use visual hub for your Figma assets.

USWDS is an open-source design system for building accessible and mobile-friendly government websites. There is no official support for Figma yet, so Patrick Morgan added the color library to the Community and explained why he settled on this design system for his projects.

A new three-part video series with DesignOps Assembly to dive into what DesignOps is, the signs to further invest in it, and insider knowledge on how to effectively scale the practice. In this first session, Taylor Oliva, Head of DesignOps at Instacart, and Adam Fry-Pierce, Head of DesignOps at Docusign, dive into how to determine when your company needs to build out DesignOps. 

Interesting talk by Zeplin​’s co-founder and Head of Product Berk Cebi on the evolution of design systems over the last 10 years, the role that design tools play in this process, and the unfortunate disconnect between our design components, code, and documentation. He suggests design tokens may be one of the potential solutions and shows how they can be used to connect the parts of the design system.

A recording of a big workshop from the Friends of Figma Portugal meetup.

A widget to seamlessly document changes in your Figma files and libraries.

A condensed summary of a Config talk by the Intuit Design System Team on creating a brand new Figma plugin to promote Intuit’s design system decisions and deliver them directly to their designers.

A solid collection of plugins to help you design, manage and operate design systems in Figma.

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.

Interface Inventory is a key research activity before any design system is started. See also the thread by Jan Toman on why he created this resource.

Recently I’ve shared a few no-code tools for generating code from Figma mockups, but this one is different and works in reverse by generating Figma components and variants from your code and Storybook stories. Nifty idea!

Jan Six, creator of the powerful Figma Tokens plugin, joined forces with Marc Andrew, creator of a massive Cabana design system, to rebuild the system using tokens. It’s still an early version, but Jan talks about some of the benefits of the new approach in this article.

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.

“Figma has advanced enough where it now supports some powerful concepts that can help with the flexibility and maintainability of a design system. In this article, Sasha explains why she finds the Systems Designer position so rewarding — and it’s not only because of how fast certain tools have developed to help her master challenges she faces in her work projects.”

“One significant aspect that design systems solve is serving as a single source of truth across products so that we can save ourselves from this mess at handoff. But what is this single source of truth and how do the teams working on it build and manage it?”

A guide on how to build design systems that scale easily and sync with GitHub, with the help of a plugin called Figma Tokens.

Jan Toman with a thread of different ways this plugin can be used to automate routine operations of maintaining a design library, removing the need to use checklists, and increasing consistency along the way.

Femke shares some of her favorite educational resources, UI kits, and design systems for Figma.