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.

Cool integration with a no-code app. ​”Bubble offers a powerful point-and-click web editor and cloud hosting platform that allows users to build fully customizable web applications and workflows.”

Convert Figma layouts into responsive webpages (in Tailwind) or mobile apps (in Flutter and SwiftUI). The plugin takes Auto Layout into account, and even when it’s not applied, but objects are aligned, it will make them responsive.

The team at Youse switched to Figma from Sketch, Marvel, Zeplin, and Google Drive. They tried to solve their problems with Abstract, but gave up and moved everything to Figma after a few months. Not only that improved collaboration and handoff process within teams but also saved almost 65% of tools cost.

Cool app for creating high-fidelity prototypes and exporting HTML from Figma designs. See also their review on DesignCourse YouTube channel.

No idea who needs this, but worth bookmarking just in case.

A framework for evaluating design tools from the team at Figma. ​“To find the right fit, it’s not just about reading countless articles and reviews to identify the ​‘best in class‘ option. Rather, there are a number of considerations — team size, distribution, workflow — that should inform the decision.”

While the title mentions only Adobe XD, I liked how they also tried Sketch for Teams and Framer X before settling on Figma. Their final scoresheet is very detailed and seems quite accurate.

The article compares three main players — Sketch, Figma, and Adobe XD. Figma is the recommended tool, but Adobe XD has its own market with more complex prototypes.

The Increment is a cool magazine published by Stripe, with every issue focused on one topic in how teams build and operate software systems at scale. The topic of the last issue is Frontend, and this article explores how integrated design tools are reshaping the workflows of the UX, UI, and frontend teams.

Automatic daily backup of high-resolution images from Figma (.fig is not supported by the API yet). I thought that there could be a place for a 3rd-party tool like this when Cameron Moll couldn’t locate his Figma files.

Unofficial desktop application for Linux made with Electron.