A new 3rd-party app for commenting on Figma files from your phone.

Mizko shares his opinion along with votes from 913 designers on the best design tools in 2021.

An overview of tools for converting Adobe Illustrator files to Figma. Based on this test, XD2Sketch works the best and has a comprehensive set of converters between popular design tools (the name is misleading), but their price is steep.

Speaking of Zeplin, this is a pretty good overview of how a digital agency ArcTouch uses it together with Figma.

Warren Tobias describes the whole process of developing a proper design system and replacing Sketch, Abstract, and Flinto with Figma. Interestingly, they continued using Zeplin for the handoff process as their development and engineering team is mostly outsourced.

Great skit by Pablo Stanley that made rounds in the community. Love how both Figma and Sketch played along and changed their names on Twitter for a while!

Results from a fantastic survey of over 4,000 designers run by Taylor Palmer. Figma basically destroyed the competition in almost every category this year. Compare with the results from 2019 that I shared a year ago in Issue #3.

SystemFlow is a new designer-first, utility framework for Webflow and Figma, with 1000+ CSS classes, pre-built components, layouts, and more.

Python scripts for simplifying design review and sharing design work. Scripts download updated screens from Zeplin or/​and Figma to a new folder with the current date.

Anima has announced the launch of version 4.0, which will allow designers to create prototypes in Figma that are translated into components in React with the click of a button. See an article on TechCrunch or watch an overview by Femke.

Excited to see Adobe shipping new exciting features. ​“We’re introducing an entirely new way to design in XD with 3D Transforms. Now, you can move and rotate objects forwards, backwards, and across planes to bring depth and perspective to your designs and create new types of user experiences.”

Sketch team wrote a beautiful essay on why they are committed to building a native Mac app. I love high-quality Mac apps, and Sketch is definitely one of them, but most of the time, design apps are not used in solitude. When it comes to collaboration, web-based multiplayer apps are just more open and efficient. See also comments on Hacker News.

Design Lead Gabriela Schmitz from LottieFiles gave a talk at Figma Meetup. If you didn’t try it yet, Lottie has a popular plugin for Figma.

Figma is a 2020 Innovation by Design winner in User Experience category. Fast Company credits it, at least partially, with enabling companies to work remotely. ​“Figma has become the virtual whiteboard of the pandemic.”

Backstage is Spotify’s homegrown developer portal. This article shows how to design for it using a combination of Figma and Storybook.

A former designer at Lyft makes the case against using Figma in a large organization. Because Abstract uses a real Git repository to store Sketch files, it’s ​“allowing for a structured approach to file organization at a micro and macro level.” I’m not familiar with permissions on an Organization plan, but that sounds like a nightmare: “…imagine you have thousands of business-critical files shared by 250 designers all of which are editable by the whole team by default!”

Tim Benniks looks at how Figma, Zeplin, VS Code, and Storybook can work together to provide a much better experience for developers.

A few tips and plugin recommendations that helped Brendan Ciccone migrate six projects from Sketch to Figma in less than one week.

Creating a smooth parallax scrolling animation in Figma and Framer. It’s nice that both apps work in the browser, and Framer has a built-in Figma import.

A new plugin from Figmatic for converting and exporting designs from Figma to Sketch with a single click.