I’ve seen a lot of confusion over the removal of the Inspect panel and the introduction of Dev Mode, so happy to see a detailed walkthrough of the free viewer experience recorded by Tom Lowry. Pretty much everything from the old Inspect panel is still available for free, and Dev Mode builds on top of that foundation. While some will inevitably label Dev Mode as a ​“money grab”, I won’t be surprised if many teams will save money by converting full Design seats to standalone Dev Mode seats.

Always love deep dives from people behind the features! Product Designer Oscar Nilsson explains how Annotations came to be — for both design and development. On why annotations are in the Dev Mode: ​“We wanted one dedicated space to curate a spec for developers and call out necessary details or areas of confusion, so we ultimately decided that designers should go to Dev Mode to annotate. In doing so, designers would see exactly what their developer counterpart sees while annotating, and they could share a link to Dev Mode when they’re done. Our goal is not for Dev Mode to silo developers once a designer’s work is done — but to engage the broader team in the product development process, with annotations being a first, crucial step.”

On positioning in context: ​“Testing and iterating on our positioning logic became an adventure on its own. We explored a direction in which annotations hide until you click on a corresponding frame. That felt right in theory, but once we actually tried it, we realized that it was still easy to miss out on important annotations if you were just looking at a frame without actively selecting it. We then iterated on different versions of automatically expanding annotations based on zoom level and position, and it immediately felt more intuitive.”

Dev Mode moved out of beta last week, and in this article, the Figma team talks about their product philosophy, how they’re improving the experience for developers and designers, and what’s coming next. There are new features that bring design and code closer together, including annotations in Dev Mode, along with improvements to compare changes, plugins, and the Figma for VS Code extension.

How it started: ​“We needed a team that lived and breathed development like we did design, so in 2021, we acquired Visly — a team of eight designers and engineers who built a tool for developing UI components in React. […] The Visly team brought with them years of hands-on experience and months of research on developer tooling — in other words, they had the developer ​“intuition” we were looking for.”

How it’s going: ​“Dev Mode aims to make you more productive by connecting the tools you use and your code components to the design file. There’s no one way to work, which is why we built Dev Mode to adapt to a variety of tools, processes, and workflows. Whether you’re looking to link design and code with Storybook, ensure accessibility with Stark, or streamline project management with Jira, Linear, and GitHub, plugins allow you to extend Figma’s functionality to flex however your team works.”

A nifty plugin for quickly snapping your selected objects to the pixel grid by rounding values. Works with X and Y values, width and height, corner radius, font size, and position of all anchor points.

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.

A comprehensive font management plugin with previews, controls for variable fonts, recommended pairings, filtering by style, collections, and more. Very well done.

Cool prototyping technique built on variables.

Molly spotted a nice improvement to opening a plugin from the Community — now they can be opened in a recent file instead of creating a new empty file in Drafts.

I’ve seen Penpot 2.0 being brought up in some Dev Mode conversations, and while their support for CSS Grid Layouts is something I’d love to see in Figma, I do not think one-off copy-pasting HTML/CSS snippets is the way to go. It’s a ​“no man’s land” between no-code solutions and framework-specific codegen plugins that could be customized for the organization’s needs and connected directly to the components in code. (Thanks Christine Vallaure for sharing the video!)

An interesting take from Jacob, a co-founder of Pierre — one of the dev tools I’m most curious about. ​“Figma is where I go to approximate a finished product. World-class Product teams collaborate here on rough sketches with components built to track their perfectly engineered counterparts. […] Instead would love to see Figma start building their creative suite. Specifically, imagine a Figma engineering tool? Built from the ground up? With the same Figma principles? And built to be interoperable with their design tool…”

Loved Tom Lowry’s thoughts on designer-developer collaboration in this thread. I think most teams agree that the traditional process of throwing designs over the wall to engineers is broken and we need better tools, but I’m also cautiously skeptical of designers working directly with the source within the design tools. While this is already possible for marketing websites (hello, Webflow and Framer!), products and design systems bring a whole new level of complexity and challenges. This iteration of the Dev Mode seems like a first step in the right direction to me, but the road ahead is lengthy but bright.

After being introduced at Config 2023 last June, Dev Mode will move out of free beta on Wednesday, January 31. Last week, Figma showed improvements and features they’ve been wrapping up before the release. Annotations are a big one — ​“designers can share additional context, specs, and measurements that are connected directly to designs, and developers can easily see designers’ notes as they work, ensuring that they don’t miss any crucial callouts during handoff.” Teams that did this manually will save a ton of time and effort. (As the top comment on Reddit suggests, flow arrows are a missing piece for annotations and something I’d love to see brought from FigJam.)

The compare changes modal was redesigned to show diffs both visually and in code. This is one of my favorite features, and I wish it wasn’t limited to the Dev Mode. I duplicate frames to riff on ideas all the time, and the compare view is an incredible tool for reconciling the differences between the two versions.

Enterprise customers can set plugins to run by default in Dev Mode for all files in their organization — ​“for example, you may want to check that you’re using a design system correctly, show links to design systems documentation, include information about internal APIs to use, or confirm whether a design uses components that already exist in your codebase.” Finally, the Figma for VS Code extension was redesigned to run plugins and improve the navigation and discoverability of design files. Instead of having to pan around a large canvas, you can easily select from a grid of frames and see frames individually with a focused view.

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!

A new plugin from Designer Advocate Hiroki Tani for generating color variables from the palette on canvas. It creates a collection from the section name, modes from nested frames, and variables from rectangles.

Common keyboard shortcuts for developers to perform actions like zooming, dragging the canvas around, copying the link to a specific screen, selecting the parent of your selection, exporting selection, and toggling a layout grid.

Chad shows how to use variables to change your variants on nested component instances when setting a mode.

A few less-known and undervalued tips from Mal on working with comments in Figma. Personally, I had no idea that comments can be added to a selection or can contain images! I’d also suggest enabling the ​“Only current page” filter to keep a list focused.

Luis wonders whether variables scoping provides enough semantic modification to justify removing explicit ​“background”, ​“border”, and ​“text” color variables. ​“What’s stopping us from maintaining a single, primitive set of variables, named as such (e.g. red-300) to match your developer’s framework, relying on scoping alone to bridge this gap?” (See the discussion in this thread on X.)

I also like this take from Nate Baldwin — primitive color palettes are inherently semantic because every lightness stop is knowingly created to be used for specific use cases. He supports this idea with examples from his work on Adobe’s Spectrum color palette.

You can now select incompatible modes on layers, to make it easier to diagnose layers that aren’t able to use the mode (via Jacob Miller).

The Designer Advocate team recently hosted another Office Hours AMA focused on the use of variables in Figma. Watch Lauren Andres, Luis Ouriach, Chad Bergman, and Shana Hu discuss nested instance variant binding, applying boolean variables, and a few related questions.