A cool technique of using randomizer plugins like Random Swap Variants and Variants Randomizer to generate a set of unique illustrations from predefined components.

Figma is changing how they refer to paid seats across all of the products (Figma Design, Dev Mode, and FigJam). The paid seats are used to be ​“Editor” seats, and now they are ​“Full” seats.

Using variables to create a night and day version of the same illustration. Love this approach!

Miggi goes over all of the basics when getting started with variables and modes for your design layouts. ​“Explore what it takes to use variables to create a dark and light mode experience, change the density of your spacing, vary the languages your design UI can accommodate, and so much more.”

Miggi celebrates his 3rd anniversary at Figma (congratulations!) by demonstrating how to make a color wheel. (A coincidence, but just earlier this week I was making the same color wheel with a very similar technique!)

Ridd recommends including little nav menus in high-fidelity prototypes so that viewers can easily inspect the different states of a page. Great advice and something I’m going to introduce to my prototypes!

A cool tutorial on creating an animated card background using Rogie​’s popular Noise & Texture plugin — fast-forward to the end to see the final result.

That’s a pretty useful desk mat! It’s still worth investing in learning shortcuts while we’re waiting for the Figma Creator Micro keyboard. Made by Ratsuns.

Vijay shared his collection of loader prototypes in the community.

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

Double Glitch reproduced in Figma a cool (or should I say ​“frozen”? Sorry!) effect first created by Marcus Eckert for the Riveo app. This cursor-tracking prototyping technique is getting wild!

How to preserve a button’s volume across multiple themes? Ridd suggests combining brand variables with a style wrapper for reusing gradients.

In the second part of his monumental article, Luis covers ​“how to build adaptable, indexable, logical, and specific components as part of the FRAILS framework.” (The two-part series was strategically published before the Christmas break, giving you some extra time to read it.)

A new code plugin from Jake, Figma Developer Advocate: ​“This plugin allows you to write and generate code snippets for Figma nodes, which are rendered in the Inspect Panel in Dev Mode. You can make these code snippets dynamic, by referring to parameters provided by the plugin. Doing this for your component library will bring accurate code snippets to any project that incorporates your design system.”

Double Glitch is building on the powerful cursor-tracking technique I shared in the previous issue with a new tutorial for creating an interactive glowing card using a resource file he published in the community.

A new long-read from Luis Ouriach published in the Smashing Magazine: ​“Design systems can be of immense help, but failure to adopt them invalidates the hard work that goes into building the thing in the first place! In this two-part series of articles, Luis shares his experience with design systems and how you can overcome the potential pitfalls, starting from how to make designers on your team adopt the complex and well-built system that you created to what are the best naming conventions and how to handle the auto-layout of components, indexing/​search, and more.”

On Tuesday, Work Louder opened preorders for the Figma edition of their Creator Micro keyboard that ships in Q2 2024. I never got into mechanical keyboards, but their other products look incredible and might be a tipping point for me — preordered the Figma mini-keyboard right away. See a sneak peek by Nolan Perkins, the unboxing stream from Miggi, and a behind-the-scenes thread from Robert Bye. The Verge and Fast Company have also covered it.

“Lottielab’s editor offers the easiest, fastest and most robust way to create animations for your websites and apps, exported as Lotties, GIFs and MP4s and allows you and your team to manage all these assets in one place. And with the Lottie format being supported natively by almost all major design tools out there (Canva, AdobeXD, Origami, Webflow, Framer etc), we’ve become the most complete way for designers to create animations for all platforms.”

I didn’t know Cmd-clicking on the nodes of the shape releases the handles — a slick tip from Miggi!

Anthony DiSpezio shares instructions and a script to see your most used keyboard shortcuts in Figma. (Can be a great starting point for setting up an upcoming Creator Micro keyboard!) On my personal computer, the top 5 are undo, deep-select, zoom-in, measure-to-selection, and escape.