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.

Ana Boyer with a tutorial on how to create a range slider with Auto Layout.

A super useful video from Akbar, a Developer Advocate at Figma: ​“Want to sync your Figma Variables with your codebase? In this video, we’ll show you how to use our Variables GitHub Action example repo to sync your Figma Variables to your codebase and vice versa.”

In a follow-up to the above interview, Niko and Garrett share what it means to establish a ​“prototyping culture” in your company and why it matters. ​“Prototyping creates an interactive experience that brings the product to life, revealing interactions that might be overlooked in static designs. When integrated into the product development process early, it saves engineering time and streamlines workflows. Adopting a prototyping culture fosters innovation.”

Double Glitch presents the video tutorial on cursor tracking technique as the first part of his series on advanced prototyping in Figma. You might remember his demo of this effect from a few months ago. A smart way to achieve the effect with a grid of interactive components!

Ridd interviewed Nikolas Klein and Garrett Miller from the prototyping team at Figma. Together, they provide a behind-the-scenes look at everything that led up to the advanced prototyping release at Config 2023. For a few takeaways on two types of prototypes and the use of variables, see this thread by Ridd.

“Rolling out to all Enterprise accounts over the next week, org admins can now sort users by cost center into a new container called billing groups. This allows them to track costs while using workspaces for content organization and collaboration. As part of this roll out, license management will transition from workspace admins to billing group admins. Workspace admins will no longer upgrade and downgrade users in their workspace or participate in true up.”

“Rolling out to Enterprise accounts over the next week: Org admins on enterprise accounts can now designate workspaces as ​“hidden” for more control over their sensitive content. Users who are not a member of the hidden workspace won’t be able to see it, but can still interact with individual documents they’ve been added to.”

Sho Kuwamoto on variables and simplicity: ​“The obvious way to make things simpler is to remove things. Or maybe hide things. But one of the surprising aspects of simplicity is that sometimes, in order to make things feel more simple, you have to add more stuff.”