Bjango, the maker of the popular apps iStat Menus and Snowflake, tests how various design tools utilize memory, what’s their baseline usage with no documents open, and how memory grows with lots of large documents open. Not surprisingly, Figma has the highest memory usage as an Electron app. ​“I believe Figma loads a full copy of the application per tab, which may be part of the cause for its high memory usage. Each tab is also limited to 2GB of RAM, leaving around 1.75 GB for the largest possible document. Put another way, if you purchased a Mac Studio with 192 GB of RAM, you could only open documents that use less than 1% of it. This is different from the other applications tested, which have access to the Mac Studio’s full 192 GB, minus whatever the system is using. Figma simultaneously uses the most overall memory of all the tools tested, while also being the most constrained.”

Miggi causes the ​“figception” by using Jambot to come up with ideas for making Figma content. Quite amazing to see how it can be used as a tool for thought (or even programming, FWIW).

Jambot is a free widget from Figma to interact with ChatGPT right in FigJam. Use it to create visual mindmaps, take a multi-threaded approach to brainstorming, or generate ideas with teammates and ChatGPT on the same canvas. Quite amazing that it was born during last month’s Maker Week and is already live!

Amber Bravo sat down with Jambot engineers and a designer to learn what inspired them to make the widget, and why they’re so excited to see ChatGPT go multiplayer. As a power user of Logseq, I loved this bit from Daniel Mejia on where the inspiration came from: ​“I’ve been a heavy user of these tools called Networked Thought — especially Roam Research and Logseq — which basically allow you to create pages that link between each other, so you can connect, organize, and trace ideas. More recently, I also found this tool called Albus, which adds a visual feel to interacting with AI, and so I thought there should be a way to connect these concepts to create a potentially useful alternative to ChatGPT.”

Lottielab is a new tool for creating and managing Lottie animations that won Product of the Day at ProductHunt this week. Images can be imported from Figma, SVGs, or Lottie files, and exported as Lottie, GIF, or MP4 to any platform. From Drew, a co-founder of Lottielab: ​“We are streamlining this cluttered process into a simple, seamleass, all-in-one workflow, with all the benefits of modern design tooling fit for today’s product development teams — being web-based, collaborative and easy to use — no After Effects knowledge needed.”

You can now embed videos in FigJam. MP4 and MOV files are both supported.

That’s pretty cool, especially if your team has multiple products with distinct color palettes! ​“Introducing custom color palettes in FigJam: you can now create custom color palettes for your team, so your files can match your team’s own aesthetic or company branding (Organization and Enterprise plans only).”

Missed that piece at Forbes a few weeks ago: ​“If you ask me, the antitrust environment right now is kind of nuts. […] I’m going to apply similar thinking to Adobe’s proposed $20 billion acquisition of Figma. The short version: I believe this deal is a sound one, and that regulators who are dubious about it are looking at the wrong things if they really want to promote innovation and protect customers.”

Interesting note on Adobe XD: ​“At one point, XD had 200 people working on it, but the product lacked the real-time collaborative element that drives Figma’s success, and sales never took off. Adobe ultimately reassigned more than 90% of the people working on XD; fewer than 20 work on the app now, and their job is just to keep it running smoothly to fulfill existing contracts.”

Mal shows hot updates to the new FigJam app for the iPad! It got the new native toolbar with a fresh look and feel. The app was optimized for Apple Pencil, and now it supports a responsive experience for multitasking.

Latest diagramming improvements in FigJam:

• Choose from over 10 new drag-and-drop shapes including star, plus, and hexagon
• Straight line connectors now anchor to the center of objects for more visually streamlined flows
• Swap between shapes quickly as you build diagrams

“Grab teammates’ attention in stickies or any text in your FigJam files by typing @ followed by their name.”

Charli Marie with ten tips on how you can get the most out of FigJam.

Mal with a quick demo of Shaper, Magic Marker, and A Selector plugins.

The all-new LottieFiles is the hottest release of this week: ​“Create production-ready animations within Figma and export them as a Lottie. Apply animated presets to a single frame or string together multiple frames to create your fun animation. Bring the power of motion to your designs with LottieFiles for Figma.”

Nice update to the Raycast extension for searching Figma files — now it works with multiple teams. See Ridd’s thread on how it speeds up his Figma workflow.

Now dropping your FigJam files into Notion pages works even better.

After adding screen readers support to Figma prototypes last year, now it’s introduced to FigJam. With this update, screen reader or keyboard users can move focus around the canvas, as well as between different menus and screens, to create, edit, and read out content. I love how these improvements make FigJam better for everyone: ​“Users can now navigate FigJam files using the Tab key to jump between objects on the canvas, as well as between text nodes for efficient editing. Hold Shift-Tab to tab in reverse.”

The accessibility team also shared a few tips on making FigJam files more accessible: provide ​“alt” text to images, use Sections to group content, numbered lists to describe order, and underscores to communicate fill-in-the-blanks.

A big update to FigJam — custom templates for your team, stamp your teammates’ faces to files and tag them with @mentions, emoji picker opens by typing a colon (“:”), custom color palettes (coming soon), UserTesting and Great Question integrations, Productboard widget, and new tunes! Also, explore new world-class teams’ templates and see a thread by Cai on the Figma design team’s rituals and templates they use in daily work.

In addition to a bigger release, there are a bunch of good quality-of-life improvements: toggling between thin and thick markers with Command–B (lovely animation!), an addition of Paste to replace (Command–Shift–V) command to FigJam, and connecting two objects by simply clicking on one object followed by clicking on another.

“Get an inside look into how the design team at Mixpanel builds internal morale, a culture of coaching, and team trust. In this livestream, you’ll hear directly from two design managers about how they’ve made the relationship between managers and designers more human-centered. They’ll share insights on how to foster a culture of collaboration and feedback, templates for both managers and ICs, and provide practical strategies and tactics to use in your next 1:1!”