#Features

A lightweight plugin that converts high-fidelity mockups to loading or “skeleton” screens.

“Associates colors to styles if it finds matching or very similar ones.”

“We’re bringing our open platform to FigJam so developers can build plugins and widgets to automate workflows and engage the entire team. Widgets are interactive, native-like objects — like polls, games, and notepads — that the entire team can use together. Hear from Figmates and developers from the Community to see how you can build your own!”

While this approach feels backwards, I think it’s an interesting idea to explore for the developer handoff. Auto Layout is quite close to Flexbox, so creating a universal utility wrapper shouldn’t be hard.

Rogie made a new plugin for playing a prototype while editing it. Because the plugin accesses the file id, it has to be installed locally. (I usually just open a prototype in a new app window while working on it.)

Joey Banks with a tip on indicating component or layer status through naming.

Josh Cusick shares how the Design Systems team at Microsoft built, maintained, and set up for people to contribute the Figma UI kit for Teams Component Libraries (TCL). He covers structuring pages, naming things, aligning with code, design tokens, and version control.

Ridd shares his approach to organizing files in Figma.

Molly shares a few takeaways from recreating a responsive Asana dashboard in Figma.

The developer of the popular Mac app iStat Menus tested how various design tools utilize the hardware they’re running on. For Figma, GPU seems to be more important than CPU, while memory is not a big factor as usage is limited to 2GB per tab. Good to know if you’re getting a new Mac but not sure about the config.

Tom Lowry gives a walkthrough of some of the new commenting improvements and enhancements.

Ryhan Hassan, Product Designer at Figma, on comments redesign: “To help teams manage and incorporate feedback throughout the design process, we’re introducing updates to comments in Figma and FigJam. These changes are designed to encourage collaborators to share comments and understand how to give better feedback, while helping designers more easily act on the input they receive.” Also, see his Twitter thread on design details and Christa Simon’s thread on design research.

Fantastic redesign of comments — now the pins are visible by default and form clusters when you zoom out. They’ve also added search, sorting, reactions, and selecting an area to comment on. Show or hide pins with Shift-C.

While outlining a stroke is a common feature in design tools, I’ve never seen the opposite!

Insert and retain the original resolution of big images, working around Figma’s limitation of 4,096 pixels during imports. Just last week, I had to add a few large screenshots to the project and ended up cutting them down manually in Pixelmator while thinking of building this plugin. Apparently, Yuan Qing Lim had the same idea a while ago!

Ridd shows how he automated a repetitive part of his workflow with Automator.

Jordan Singer on why he is building Automator, a general purpose tool to automate Figma. Its private beta was all the rage last week — see a few creative ways to use it below.

Cool FigJam widgets made by Bersabel Tadesse and Noah Levin. Hope they’ll be published one day!

The New York Times Crossword from 2/20/2012, playable as a Figma prototype through its Interactive Components feature.

Breakdown of using Figma to illustrate and animate Vijay’s first NFT.