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.
Finally found some time to play with Automator plugin from @tricycleai. This thing can replace so many checklists (!!!), helping us to scale a consistency in our whole Figma library. No matter who is contributing.
— Jan Toman (@HonzaTmn) November 6, 2021
🧵 Thread with examples ⤵️
Femke shares some of her favorite educational resources, UI kits, and design systems for Figma.
Powerful use of Figma variants and VS Code design toolkit to work on dark and light themes.
👨🍳 Been cooking with our @code design toolkit in @figmadesign to make our components easily theme between dark and light variants without adding additional color styles. This is looking promising. pic.twitter.com/EUUasD0EMv
— Miguel Solorio (@miguelsolorio_) October 29, 2021
“Join to hear from Lauren Duxbury and Julie Lee at Honeywell about how they evaluated, tested, and advocated for a design system that works for designers.”
If you liked Jan Toman’s talk at Schema, check out this one as well.
Jan Toman (see his Schema talk above) with a few recommendations for design system maintainers.
A simple tip for UI kit maintainers in @figmadesign:
— Jan Toman (@HonzaTmn) October 3, 2021
- Release changes in smaller batches
- Add a detailed description of what was changed
- (Optional) Reassure consumers that nothing will break
Write changelogs. Small things like this matter. pic.twitter.com/J6kA16pj1f
“Ever wonder how other companies set up their Figma files? Joel Miller from Figma will take us behind the scenes and provide tips, tricks, and examples you can implement today.” See also a Twitter thread with all the resources that Joel shared.
Hugo Raymond, Burberry. “How can we better understand the context of our Design Systems among our broader product teams? Join us to learn Burberry’s approach, including how to best work with engineers, standardise and understand shared context for reusability, and how to think about both strict and loose frameworks of adoption.”
Heldiney Pereira, Monzo. “We all spend time reflecting on structures of design systems, but have we invested enough understanding the governance of those systems? Join Heldiney as he digs into the different models available to run and scale design systems globally.”
“Figma’s Designer Advocate Luis Ouriach has been collecting your questions in chat and online. He’ll dig in with our speakers to tackle design systems questions big and small.”
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.”
Jina Anne, Ivy Wang, and Ainsley Wagoner from Asana. “This talk is about how the Asana Design Systems team uses design tokens to get designers and engineers working at the same level of abstraction. We will talk about how Figma’s design system tooling, along with design tokens, enables us to make the redundant parts of designing more streamlined so that we can focus on solving design problems.”
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.””
Jan Toman, Productboard. “Not sure where to start? Get your libraries off the ground by learning how to craft UI kits that designers will love using. We’ll dive into building flexible components, aligning their API with code, and dealing with changes as the design system evolves.”
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.”
Figma announced Schema, a conference focused on building, scaling, and contributing to design systems. Apply to attend on October 7th, 2021 for a virtual day of sessions led by top design systems leaders from Atlassian, Lyft, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, and Productboard. Read more in Thomas Lowry’s blog post.
“Getting started building your design system can be a lot to take on, which is why we thought we’d bring in Steve Dennie from Onfido. They’ve been doing excellent work in the space and their Team, Project, and File organization is a delight.”