Video recording of the latest announcements at FigJam: ​“Hear from Rogie, Bersabel, and Emily as they introduce Templates, new shapes, code blocks, open sessions, plugins, widgets​and new pricing! We’ll also feature live demos of widgets from our partners at Donut, Stark, and CoderPad; watch to learn how you can make FigJam the home for your brainstorms.“

A recap of everything that got shipped in October: new FigJam capabilities (see below), Interactive Components, and Branching. A busy month after a multi-year effort!

Bravo Studio is a platform for building mobile apps from Figma prototypes without writing code. The new version adds a whole new set of functionalities. See also their new demo video.

“Today’s launch of Anima 5 marks another milestone on our mission to perfect the design-to-development workflow: truly functioning Material Design in Figma and Adobe XD. This means you can now build prototypes using actual code-based Material UI components.”

According to the results of Jamstack Community Survey 2021, 60% of respondents use Figma, and its satisfaction score is 8.8. Look at the chart to see how incredible this score is when compared to other design tools. There is nothing like this in any other category either (except for IDEs, but that’s not a specific tool.)

“FigJam is an online whiteboard for teams to ideate and brainstorm together. Purpose-built for the earliest stages of design, FigJam makes everything from discovery to design sprints easier and more fun — whether you’re working alone or collaborating with your extended team. Let’s see how we can use FigJam collaboratively in an online brainstorming session!”

Emily Lin, the lead product manager of FigJam, shared some of her experiences and lessons learned from launching FigJam with a team at Productboard.

Ana Boyer on the best practices and strategies for collaborating in FigJam throughout the entire design process — from your first brainstorm to the final review.

You can now mix different text sizes in the same text box, sticky note, or shape.

New plus (+) and minus (-) buttons to make zooming in and out even easier in FigJam.

“In this video, we will guide you on how to select a single frame from a Lottie animation from the LottieFiles Library and export it to Figma. Then, we will use this new SVG and place it as part of our UI and animate it in Figma using the prototype feature.”

Alex shares a preview of a really smart FigJam plugin he is working on – draw any shape with a marker, and it will be recognized and turned into a real object. Looks fantastic and almost feels like it should be a part of the app!

Import and export CSV files as sticky notes, copy-paste spreadsheet cells, and export selected objects or the entire board as a PNG, PDF, or JPG. See the video on how to use these features.

New keyboard shortcuts to make backward and forward actions easier in FigJam. Bring forward: ⌘-] or Ctrl-], bring to front: ], send backward: ⌘-[ or Ctrl-[, send to back: [.

People now can be @mentioned in Community comments. FigJam is improved on an iPad (hey, maybe Figma is next?). Style picker lets you select what libraries are enabled. And a few more improvements for admins of Organizations and Teams.

Miggi shows how to use audio and cursor chat in Figma and FigJam. Audio is only available on paid and education plans. Cursor chat is available both in Figma and FigJam, while high-fives are only part of the FigJam for now.

Figma introduced new ways to communicate without leaving Figma and FigJam — audio calls, cursor chat, and high fives. Press forward-slash (/) on the keyboard to start a chat message. Chat and high-fives are truly innovative, delightful, and low-friction ways to communicate with your team. Bravo!

3rd-party developers can now build plugins and widgets for FigJam. Plugins in FigJam work similarly to Figma, and existing Figma plugins can even be republished for FigJam. Widgets are more like native FigJam objects — similar to sticky notes, shapes, and connectors — except they’re custom and built by you. For now, this API is in closed beta, but it creates an incredible opportunity for building almost anything inside FigJam.

Bersabel Tadesse, Product Manager at Figma, shares behind-the-scenes of adding plugins and widgets to FigJam.

A recap of the updates to Figma and FigJam that were shipped last month.