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.

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.