Dan Hollick explains the science behind making realistic shadows and recommends the Beautiful Shadows plugin that takes care of this for you.

A new plugin for manipulating design elements to achieve interesting visual effects. “The plugin provides a wide range of features, including effortless horizontal and vertical movement, adjustments to size in both dimensions, rotation, duplication, and more.” See the demo video to come up with ideas for specific use cases.

Fons Mans is back with a new tutorial on how to create a glowing glass effect in Figma.

What, an old-school plugin without AI? 🤯 “Dithercore creates cool dithered images reminiscent of '80s and '90s computer graphics. It brings back the primitive technology of early PCs by utilizing pixel patterns and color schemes from that era.“

A pack from Double Glitch with a collection of pre-made text effects that you can apply to your designs with just a few clicks. Reminds me of the good ol’ days of downloadable Photoshop actions. While the pack is commercial, I suggest checking out a free demo in the Community and watching a screencast.

Vijay wrote a step-by-step guide on making a button with a cool multi-color glowing effect.

Vijay is experimenting with inner shadows in Figma. Despite a limit of only 8 shadows, it’s usually enough to create a 3D effect on any shape.

Vijay Verma shares a few techniques for adding simple halftone effects in Figma. See also his experiments with Rogie’s upcoming NT plugin and how he achieved a frosted glass effect.

The plugin allows you to create beautiful shadows by simply dragging a “light source,” which casts a shadow from selected elements. The shadow effect is achieved by layering and easing multiple drop-shadows to create a skeuomorphic shadow umbra and penumbra.

Now you can adjust shadow spread in Figma on some kinds of objects to create better depth, glows, and borders. It’s fully compatible with the CSS property box-shadow.

“This is a simple mockup with a glass effect created from the video presentation of the new Microsoft tool, Office.”

This is a huge time saver. Can’t believe I never tried this before.

After Smooth Shadow generator made rounds in the design community, its author built a matching Figma plugin. It’s the easiest way to build a nice smooth shadow, and as it’s based on a box-shadow CSS property it’s easy to export and reuse in code later.