New plugin for Vijay Verma for creating a beautiful stippling effect.

Brett from Designjoy shows how to achieve a cool visual effect with a Progressive Blur plugin.

Pointillism converts images into thousands of vector points. Customize the size and frequency of the dots to achieve the perfect look and bring a unified style to your designs. Compatible with Parallax, Shape move, and Physics animation plugins, it offers exciting animation possibilities.

Tyler created a short tutorial on making a realistic light beam using simple shapes, a blend mode, and a blur.

I had no idea that a Spread value in drop shadows can be negative! This effect could shrink the shadow and simulate the object’s elevation. The article explains the box-shadow property in CSS, but luckily, Figma’s drop shadow is based on it and works similarly. 

James shows how to achieve a very cool mesh gradient effect with simple tools: ​“It’s kinda silly how much you can achieve with a single blurred vector line, a gradient and a blending mode.” 

Confusingly enough, this new plugin by Anh is unrelated to another plugin with the same name I shared in issue #160. See examples on Twitter and choose which one works best for your needs.

Easily generate a frame with progressive blur, controllable by a set of parameters.

I often rely on the Spread value in shadows but forget why it is disabled. Handy reminder from Ilya Miskov.

Turns any image into a cool line pattern — an alternative to the Emboss lines plugin.

Mark recorded an unscripted tutorial on creating a beautiful animated Aurora effect with the Noise & Texture plugin.

Fons Mans shows how to create a simple glow effect inspired by Vision Pro promo at the Apple 5th Avenue store in New York.

I mentioned that technique in the last issue, and now the plugin is available in the Community. Great tool by Anvesh Dunna for creating interesting embossed line patterns from vector layers.

It all started with Rahul Chakraborty’s question about a particular illustration technique used by Sketch in their blog. Two days later, Isaac Miller built the Extrusion Effect web app to generate cool extruded illustrations, and Anvesh Dunna turned this technique into a Figma plugin — hopefully, it will be available in the Community later this week. That’s why I love the design community!

Fons Mans explains how to create an image fade effect in Figma.

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.