I shared Lenny’s interview with Mihika a couple of months ago, but it’s worth recommending again now that it’s clear that this “0 to 1” product she talked about was Figma Slides.
Mihika Kapoor shares the story of taking Flides from the Maker Week pitch to reality. That team photo in the end is a poor gold. Also, see Keeyen’s demo tutorial from a year ago with an early prototype, where he pretends to be Zander Supafast.
“As a tradeoff for pixel-level control and the familiarity of their favorite toolkit in Figma, designers have gone without basic slide functionalities like speaker notes and slide transitions. Figma Slides not only addresses those core features, but amplifies design functionality, making it easier for both designers and non-designers to co-create in the same space.”
“In this video, we’ll take a tour around the Figma Slides editor so you can start creating your own presentations.”
“Bring order to your files while keeping your jams in one place with Pages in FigJam.”
LottieFiles: “We are thrilled to announce that we have received strategic investments from Figma Ventures and Webflow Ventures, marking a significant milestone in our journey to democratize motion design.”
Elliot Tu from Zeplin interviewed me for their Design-to-Dev community interview series last week. We chatted about working on Figmalion, my new role, collaborating with developers, the future of design-to-dev tools, and how I use AI in my work.
This is a pretty wild experiment, started with a question: “What if you could design like a developer?” Name your layers with Tailwind classes, then run the plugin to instantly update the style. Why? Because you can, that’s why!
“Create a FigJam board during or outside of a Google Meet call to jam remotely or in person.”
A short explainer on navigating a FigJam file — panning and zooming, keyboard shortcuts, and navigation hacks. I use FigJam for presentations, and navigating sections with a Tab or Shift-Tab keys is my favorite!
Matt Jumper shares an overview of his 3‑step Figma to Framer web design process — from layout systems and creating styles to how he starts building.
Now you can use the power of AI to generate and expand mindmaps and create visual timelines in FigJam. See examples in the gallery of ready-made FigJam AI prompts.
Free website UI kit made by Framer?! You got my interest. “Easily transform your ideas into a fully functional, responsive, no-code SaaS website design within minutes using these free components for Framer and Figma.”
Mizko is rebuilding his portfolio and sharing a behind-the-scenes look into his end-to-end strategy, design, and build process in Figma and Webflow.
Fast Company calls Figma one of the “most innovative companies in applied AI” for boosting creativity and digital collaboration with the OpenAI-powered Jambot plugin for FigJam. Wild to think that it was born out of an internal two-day AI hackathon just eight months ago. (For additional context, see the above interview with Nilay Patel.)
Jenny Wen is the founding designer at FigJam and the person who brought it to market. In this interview with Ridd, she shares invaluable insights about FigJam’s product strategy, adding delight to software, and attacking ambiguity early in the process.
Webflow announced Design System Sync, a more seamless integration between Figma and Webflow powered by the new companion Webflow App for the Figma to Webflow plugin. The new app allows instant synchronization of design components and variables: “This means that any change made in Figma can be directly reflected in Webflow, eliminating the need for manual updates and ensuring that the final website is always in sync with the latest designs.”
(Archive link without a Bloomberg paywall.) RIP Adobe XD. The writing was on the wall even back in 2022, but now I wonder if Adobe will just leave a big gap in a cohesive offering of the Creative Suite? Lively discussion at Hacker News.
“When it agreed to buy Figma, which helps users design app and website interfaces, Adobe put its competing program XD in “maintenance mode,” ceasing to launch new features or sell it individually. The deal to purchase Figma fell apart under regulatory pressure in December and the creative software giant hadn’t announced whether it would resurrect XD or attempt to build another competitor. “We have no plans to further invest in it,” a spokesperson said Tuesday of XD.”
I’ve seen Penpot 2.0 being brought up in some Dev Mode conversations, and while their support for CSS Grid Layouts is something I’d love to see in Figma, I do not think one-off copy-pasting HTML/CSS snippets is the way to go. It’s a “no man’s land” between no-code solutions and framework-specific codegen plugins that could be customized for the organization’s needs and connected directly to the components in code. (Thanks Christine Vallaure for sharing the video!)
A friendly reminder to backup your data in the new year. Yes, Figma files are safely stored in the cloud, but one day a file could be accidentally deleted or you may lose access to the account. This is a Node.js CLI tool to backup Figma files and store them as local .fig files. (Keep in mind that if you’re a part of the Organization or Enterprise account, that action will be logged and you might need permission from the company.)