Quick tips from Ana Boyer on how to use a Figma community file with the Batch Styler and Similayer plugins to quickly build a custom design system.

A few tips on managing the workload as a single designer — from ways to optimize processes to Figma techniques and plugins that can save you time in the long run.

Vijay Verma (who you may remember by fantastic illustrations made in Figma) writes about building and scaling Sushi, Zomato’s in-house design system. While this post is not about Figma, I like how he broke down the process of building a design system into specific steps: auditing the UI inventory, formulating the foundation, creating component libraries, governing the system, building support for all platforms, and mapping workflows and onboarding.

Ridd shows his process for creating responsive and customizable templates.

“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.”

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.”

In this episode of ​“Coffee with Charli”, she talks with Ramy Majouji, product design lead at Glossier. Together they show off some unique ways Glossier uses their design system to create tools for folks outside of product design.

“Learn how ABB placed collaboration at the center of their design system to enable an international squad of designers and developers to succeed.”

Marc Andrew gives valuable tips and advice on the best way to start your own design system.

“When scaling up your design systems, you’ll more often than not require a slightly different theme or treatment for different products or brands. By making use of nested components, team settings, and inheritance, we set this up really quickly within Figma.“

See how Interactive Components can dramatically reduce the number of connections you create.

In this part of Figma in 5, Rogie talks about Design Systems with a focus on components.

“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.”

“In this episode, Charli talks sits down with Ashley Seto, lead product designer lead at Pinterest. Together they dig into what it takes to govern a design system and the systems and process in place that can help get everyone on board.”

“In this episode, Charli talks with her colleague Alf Salib, product design lead at ConvertKit. Together they dig into what it takes to implement a design system with a small team and get real about the challenges and lessons learned along the way.”

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.)

Mirko Santangelo collected great resources from Uber, Microsoft, GitHub, Spotify, and more.

Tim explains the concept of elevation in Material Design and how to work with it in Figma.

Figma and Charli Marie, Creative Director at ConvertKit, introduce the new video series ​“Coffee with Charli”, where she’ll interview design systems leaders. First up, Charli chats with Chris Pearson of Conde Nast about design systems for multiple brands.

During an audit of marketing pages, the team at Figma realized they weren’t following their own advice. Over the course of a month, their small team created and organized a robust, adaptable style guide and component library that now lives in their CMS. I loved that part: “…every color has its own branded name, inspired by California, where Figma is based. An earthy green is avocado toast, and an ember yellow is sunset.”