New plugin for working with perceptual color and OKLCH color space! This initial release allows inspecting and manipulating color stops in gradients using the OKLCH color space — pretty useful if you have an existing gradient that needs a little tweaking. Bonus point for providing precise control over color stop positions!

A few good tips on adjusting the color hue, opacity, and evenly distributing color handles.

Molly with step-by-step instructions for using rem units in your text properties. The developers on your team will be grateful for using the same units as they do when it comes to the handoff time!

Luis shows that if your styles have multi-mode variables as their values, Swap Libraries still works for managing theme swapping in a multi-brand setup.

Bjango, the maker of the popular apps iStat Menus and Snowflake, tests how various design tools utilize memory, what’s their baseline usage with no documents open, and how memory grows with lots of large documents open. Not surprisingly, Figma has the highest memory usage as an Electron app. ​“I believe Figma loads a full copy of the application per tab, which may be part of the cause for its high memory usage. Each tab is also limited to 2GB of RAM, leaving around 1.75 GB for the largest possible document. Put another way, if you purchased a Mac Studio with 192 GB of RAM, you could only open documents that use less than 1% of it. This is different from the other applications tested, which have access to the Mac Studio’s full 192 GB, minus whatever the system is using. Figma simultaneously uses the most overall memory of all the tools tested, while also being the most constrained.”

In Recovery Mode, you temporarily regain access to the file and can take limited actions to reduce content and restore edit access. Once you have reduced file memory below 90%, you can exit recovery mode and regain full edit access to your file.

A new take on Little Big Updates from Figma — every Thursday this fall they’re releasing some of the 30+ updates designed to make day-to-day life a little easier. This week it’s four improvements to the Assets panel. #1 is filtering assets by a specific library file, recently viewed, default libraries, and more. #2 is larger and more visible thumbnails. #3 is showing component names by default, with variant counts on hover. #4 is my favorite — clicking on an asset opens up a new component modal that displays a larger preview and a link to the main component file, plus a component playground on the paid plans where you can preview and interact with any variants, variable modes, or component properties.

Select two vector shapes and specify how many steps to create between them.

I’ve been using it for years but never shared it before! Great for putting any objects or text on a path.

This is a short but comprehensive checklist. Worth reviewing before sharing your next file!

Allie Paschal writes about her process of migrating the Native Mobile Design System from using color styles to variables. Pretty cool to see that she already adopted a newly released scoping for color variables. I didn’t realize that some companies may not allow external plugins in Figma, so it’s nice to see that this process is completely manual and self-sufficient.

Richard Ekwonye made an interactive guide on how Bézier curves work in CSS animations and SVG paths of illustrations and icons. Such a beautiful and hands-down way to learn!

A good-to-remember shortcut! Hold the Spacebar while dragging elements to maintain the hierarchy of the elements.

An in-depth walkthrough of how to use Figma’s Auto Layout to quickly add padding and alignment rules to standardize your design elements from the Noun Project.

Somewhat related to the previous article, Ridd looked for a way to account for optical balance when icons are hidden from a button. Jordan suggested a smart solution of wrapping the label in an Auto Layout with an additional smaller padding that adds up with and without the icon.

“Our new Community Libraries Beta offers the building blocks you need to start designing, right at your fingertips. As part of the Beta, users on free plans will have access to a special selection of community wireframing, UI, and icon kits. Just click into the Assets panel and Library modal to browse through the featured libraries and design faster than ever.”

A few improvements to variables: 1) in addition to scoping number variables, you can now also scope color variables, 2) select multiple variables with Shift or Cmd for the bulk edit, 3) code syntax for defining different names for multiple platforms, and 4) modes for instance sublayers. Variables are still in beta and it’s great to see how fast the team iterates on them.

In the last 2 months Figma quietly shipped more than 200 updates to the Dev Mode workspace 🤯 This article goes through the most important 35 changes and improvements.

Miggi shows how to make a notification badge that expands to fill its contents with Auto Layout.

A short video on using the bezier curve tool to make an S‑shaped curve.