Emily Brody, Product Marketing Manager at Figma, writes about the go-to-market strategy for the Dev Mode and how the team prepared for the launch and triaged bugs, requests, and feedback during the first two weeks.

Security improvements to public links — auto-generated passwords on all plans and expiring public links on the Enterprise plan.

A new tutorial from Vijay Verma on creating an animation for a loader indicator shaped like a glass filled with liquid. The prototype uses a few variables and conditions, and he shares them in the cheat sheet in the thread.

Sam Gordashko collected resources on variables and advanced prototyping for the Design System University community, based on topics designers often struggle with.

Christine Vallaure wrote about one of the most under-the-radar new features of the Dev Mode — units conversion. Now, you can design with pixels and then translate them to rem or other relative units in code. (Thanks for sharing the friend link with Figmalion, Christine!)

Luis Ouriach with an introduction to variables and a primer on how to structure your variable collections for single and multi-brand systems.

Mark Steinruck shows how to scope variables for certain components to appear unchanged in light and dark modes.

Niko shares how advanced prototyping came from a vision in June 2022 to reality at Config 2023. The team had to ship variables, multiple actions, expressions, and conditionals simultaneously to make it happen. This release is a huge achievement and the team should be celebrated for it.

Fantastic post by Developer Advocate Jake Albaugh on how component properties can be translated and aligned between design files and coding frameworks to help designers and developers work better together. ​“Implementing components as a designer in Figma differs from implementing as a developer in a codebase. When you optimize for the developer or designer experience with a component, it is tailor-fit for that specific purpose — even if it shares a name with a component in another environment.”

Codejet converts designs to production-ready code. Create a project in Figma, and Codejet will convert it into React and TypeScript code. Was voted Product Hunt’s Product of the Day on July 13th.

A preview of the new ray tracer plugin currently in development by Yi Shen. Some of the examples are pretty wild!

Designer advocate Ana Boyer demonstrates the new advanced prototyping features by building an e‑commerce experience.

Three different methods of building an interactive Tab Group with variables, presented with their pros and cons.

Miggi with a tip on using the new auto layout wrap to handle elements beyond just a single row. Love that Shift-A automatically puts elements into a wrapped auto layout when you have multiple rows of elements selected.

Learn how to use min and max values when working with the auto layout in your designs, with a bonus of updated text truncation and max lines feature for paragraph text.

Fons Mans shows how to create a dreamy multi-color gradient with Figma without relying on any plugins.

Great help article if you’re still struggling with understanding the difference between variables and styles, or questioning if styles are becoming obsolete.

Molly Hellmuth asked 5 of her go-to design system people — Luis Ouriach, Nathan Curtis, Lewis Healey, Dan Mall, and Maria Christopher — for advice on how to start using Figma variables. My heart goes to Luis’ advice to start in a spreadsheet before jumping to Figma (but that’s also my answer to any life question).

Joey Banks spent a lot of time after Config adjusting component libraries to use the new Figma features. In this issue of Baseline, he dives deep into variables and wrote an epic guide on what they are, how he is using them, and a few shortcuts to help make workflows and creation more efficient. My favorite tip on using the number variables: ​“With your cursor inside an input, tap the equal = key on your keyboard to launch the variable list quickly, or hold Shift + click. To remove a variable, click into the input and tap Backspace twice.” (Note that the = shortcut may go away in the future.)

This part of his conclusion brought back the topic of usability vs. visibility started by component properties: ​“One thing I still find to be a little challenging within this new way of building and viewing components in Figma is that so much of the previous on-canvas visual representation is now absent using variables. Previously, if there were two density sizes used or if a layer was toggled as hidden within a particular situation, that was easy to see, as we had to build it out as a visual variant. With variables, much of that information, such as sizing, booleans, and color adjustments, is all within the Variables modal and not on the canvas.”

A new plugin by Jan Toman: ​“Export variables from one file and import them to another. It’s great for migrating libraries, or when you downloaded a library from the community and you’d like to import variables to your existing design system.”