Jacob Miller, a Product Manager on the Design Systems team, unpacks the new features and answers questions about variables: ​“Our latest updates to variables in Figma allow for even more flexibility with updates to stroke weight, effects, layout grid, and layer opacity, along with nested instance variant binding. These upgrades not only boost design customization, they help align design and code like never before. Here, we share an overview of what we’re shipping with variables, how to use them in your current workflow, and where we’re going next with typography.”

Not mentioned in the article, but my favorite update is that now the variables authoring window can be resized! See also this thread by Luis, and Hugo’s accurate summary of the community’s reaction.

Tutorial Tim dissects a beautiful Fey website and shows how to leverage developer tools in the web browser to extract CSS values and implement them in Figma.

Nice update to the Community resource pages — a new image gallery, plugin videos, and picking a relevant category to better showcase what kind of resource it is and what it can do. Also, remixes can no longer be published as they were misleading when it came to the authorship of the original resources.

If you have a paid resource in the Community, monthly payout statements are now available in your Community profile. Just click ​“View payout statements” under the ​“Metrics” tab to download a CSV of your earnings on Community.

“Prototyping in Figma allows us to create realistic designs to test on real users, but there’s a lot that goes into taking designs from static to something that looks functional. Join our team for a Q&A focused on bring your designs to life with prototyping and user testing.”

“In this livestream, Figma designer advocates, product managers, engineers, and designers will take you through everything we launched — from new on-canvas previews for the font picker, to fun new ways to collaborate in FigJam and time-saving prototyping updates.”

Users on Professional and Organization plans now can use a password that’s been autogenerated by Figma when setting a password on a file. Org admins in Enterprise organizations can choose whether to allow users to create custom passwords or require Figma-autogenerated passwords for greater security.

The Dev Mode team shares their early pivot away from a codegen-first approach, the acquisition of Visly that accelerated their efforts, and what it means to break down the handoff wall.

Luis shows how to make slot components more useful by ​“outsourcing” the component composition to a main component, whilst still allowing for completely flexible content within.

“In Figma, scroll position defines how individual objects behave when you scroll past them. There are three types of scroll positions: scroll with parent, fixed, and sticky. In this tutorial, we’ll focus on sticky scroll and see how we can use it make our prototypes even more dynamic.”

Vice President of Product, Sho Kuwamoto, explains why quality-of-life improvements are at the core of Figma: ​“I don’t want to be at a company that only invests in things that will make headlines. I want to make a product that I feel proud of. The truth is, people do resonate with little changes, and we know that because we pay attention to our users’ individual stories. Plus, when you celebrate the small things and give each one their moment, it gives people a chance to recognize how important each one is.”

The final week of LBU includes a number of quality-of-life updates.

The design editor. #22: On-canvas previews for the font picker (yay!) #23: Press Tab on a misspelled word to autocorrect the typo. #24: SF Symbols icons now render correctly. #25 and #26: Text boxes and containers (like frames and sections) can be used as snap targets. #27: Select text from the canvas in View-only mode. #28: A bug fix for the text shifts caused by changes in colors or text properties. #29: Nested component properties are visible in the playground and Dev Mode.

Collaboration tools. #30: Media in comments (yay!) #31: The full gamut of emoji reactions in comments. #32: Nominate someone to spotlight. #33: Mind maps in FigJam (whoa!) #34: Mobile app makes browsing files easier. #35 and #36: Importing Asana and Jira projects.

Prototyping experience. #37: A fix to ​“mouse enter” and ​“mouse leave” interactions. #38: The prototyping modal now pops up right when you need it. #39: Temporarily hide the edit modal by holding Shift. #40: Making it clear when you have multiple actions tucked into an interaction. #41: The inline preview can follow the current frame. #42: Sticky scrolling improvements (see more on this below).

Jake goes into the relationship between design and development in product creation and illustrates it using a quadrant model, dividing the process into four key areas: product design, design patterns, product development, and development patterns. Successful collaboration requires trust and a deep understanding of each other’s perspectives.

Teams building .NET applications may know Uno Platform, which recently launched v5.0 and now includes the first and only Figma to C# Markup export plugin. Now designers and developers using the platform can generate C# Markup directly from Figma. 

A short tutorial from Figma on using variables, interactive components, and conditional logic to build a prototype. These advanced features help prototype faster, reduce memory usage, and minimize maintenance time.

The good thing about evergreen tips is, well, that they do not get old — I keep forgetting about this one! Right-click while holding the Control key to see a list of objects below your cursor.

Christine Vallaure explains how to use boolean variables and modes to reduce the number of necessary components. One important caveat: ​“I would always recommend adding a documentation sheet to avoid confusion as per default, only the first mode will be displayed, and in development mode, hidden elements are not highlighted.” See also a second thread on using variables to trigger actions in prototypes once a specific threshold is reached.

A solid roundup of the design systems resources from one of the most respected conferences.

Finally a solid improvement to detaching instances.

Some great recommendations for quality unitasker plugins in Fons Mans’s comments.