Monotype published a new kind of trends report for 2025: ​“Ancient oracles peered into the future. From a specific point in time, they forecast what could come. That’s what we want this report to be: a typographic oracle. We want to mark this moment in time, to celebrate design and typography’s progress, and to challenge all of us to envision what lies ahead by looking at the larger cultural forces shaping our time and work.”

“Figma now transforms common character combinations into smart symbols in all fonts. Now when you type the following characters – ©, ®, ™, ->, <-, vv, ^^, \[ \] – Figma will automatically transform them into smart symbols: ©️, ®️, ™️, →, ← , ↓, ↑, ▢. This will occur with every font, as long as you have the ​“Use smart quotes/​symbols” preference on. Also available in FigJam and Slides.”

Last Tuesday, Figma rolled out the new pricing, which was announced in December. The design seats price increased, while Dev Mode seats remained unchanged and all paid seats now include FigJam and Slides. Admins got upfront approval over seat upgrades.

Turn complex variable relationships into an intuitive visual map to see and manage all your variables on one infinite canvas. Watch the demo video.

“Collaboration tools like Figma promise streamlined workflows and collective creativity, but there’s a darker side: too many opinions, endless edits, and a loss of individual vision. In this piece, we explore whether Figma’s collaborative power might actually hinder great design by inviting too many cooks into the kitchen.”

Nice built-in support for code blocks with syntax highlighting in Slides.

Figma shared new details about connected projects that will launch in the first half of 2025. They let two separate teams or organizations — like an agency and a client — collaborate on a shared project using billable seats from their plans without paying for extra seats. Pro users can connect up to 3 projects, Organization 6 and Enterprise 15. The plan of the team initiating a connected project determines features available to all users collaborating on the project. Resources like shared libraries and fonts can be enabled for everyone.

Jitter is a fast and simple animation tool. The plugin was rebuilt from the ground up for pixel-perfect compatibility, better performance, and powerful new import features like Figma Slides support, importing multiple frames or an entire Figma file, and better artboard pasting.

Ridd shows an advanced way of using variables to simplify prototyping and save a bunch of screens.

“We’ve made the scrubbable area to the left of input fields larger to make it easier to start scrubbing. We also fixed a bug that inadvertently made 1 pixel scrubbable on the right side of an input field. Rolling out over the next few days, you’ll only be able to initiate scrubbing from the left side of an input field.”

Keyboard shortcuts were finally added to boolean operations! Press ⌥⬆ (Mac) or Alt+⬆ (PC) with U to unify your selection, S to subtract, I to intersect, E to exclude, and F to flatten. The ⌘E still works for Flatten!

“See when teammates and invited guests last visited your Figma files, helping you track engagement and keep projects moving forward.”

Plugins are now available in Figma Slides, and three dozen plugins have already been updated to support it.

Product Marketer Sarah Kelly and Designer Advocate Kaitie Chambers share all the recent launches and introduce a few brand-new features. The Figma team also gives hands-on demos on how to use the new features in your workflow immediately.

Cool page curl prototype by Miggi. Don’t miss the page turn animation on click.

The Billing section in Admin settings is now organized into an Overview tab with a high-level summary of your plan and everything you’re paying for, as well as an Invoice tab with all your past payments. On the Enterprise plan, a new tab for billing groups enables admins to drill in and navigate to a specific billing group page.

Luis Ouriach built a plugin for copying or exporting your Figma variables into CSS variables format.

A new plugin by Vijay Verma to quickly create animated smart components that are used most of the time, like rotate, zoom, slide, etc. It generates a set of components based on the selected animation preset.

A creative workaround to turn text underline into color highlight with no hacks.

Kinda wild how big of a deal last week’s Aspect Ratio release has become. While it’s one of the ​“finally!” releases, it’s also a good reminder that many features considered essential by product teams might actually wait quite a while. The Technology Brothers podcast covered the design community’s reaction and followed up with a discussion about Figma’s position in the market.