Nick Babich shows how to create a responsive grid system and explains the difference between Center and Stretch grid types, as well as how to calculate the right gutter and margin for different viewports. See also his layout grid cheat sheet.

Erez Reznikov argues that in the next generation of design tools, designing and building digital products will have to abide by the constraints of the platform in which they are coded and tested. ​“The right tool will have to be built for a collaboration. A true collaboration, not a handoff. With developers, because complex products (which will be the vast majority) need them. There’s no avoiding that with dreams of magic AI fairy dust and no-code, no-dev narrow builders, empowering as they may seem.”

Nick Villapiano, the Director of Front End Development at One North: ​“Dev Mode recognizes that developers don’t just implement design—we’re active participants who need our own set of tools. Carving out a dedicated space within Figma allows developers to contribute meaningfully to the design process from concept to launch. By utilizing recognizable patterns and tried-and-true engineering practices as inspiration, we can do so in ways that feel natural to existing workflows.”

Dev Mode now suggests variables when the value matches a style, color, or size, even if it wasn’t specified in the design. The new color picker also moved in this direction, and now I want this principle to be applied whenever my values overlap with a style or variable. It should be easier both for designers and developers to use the right primitives.

Selecting a variable in Dev Mode now opens a pop-up panel that includes values, properties, aliases, collection information, and more. There is also a new view for all the variable collections used in the file. Watch a demo of all the new features.

A new libraries modal optimized for adding and browsing relevant libraries. Highlights of this redesign include a new recommended tab and overall improvements to performance and navigation.

Choose a color, style (solid, dotted, or wavy), thickness, and offset of your underlines.

Joey Banks on creating responsive and robust components within Figma: ​“Creating a component in Figma is relatively easy. However, building a component that works well in various situations and for different screen widths and heights using tools like constraints and auto layout can be more challenging and intimidating. Let’s first talk about those tools and how they work within Figma, and I’ll share the techniques and practices that have helped me ensure I’m building reliable components for those depending on the system.”

Is this new? Very cool.

Select multiple layers in Figma Slides and apply edits to them all at once.

Component properties can now be bound to variables, unlocking the ability to use translation strings in props. Learn how to bind them together in this video by Chad Bergman or this thread by Jacob Miller.

A fully redesigned eyedropper for UI3 now supports color variables and styles! Rotate between color formats with the Tab key — previously, that could have been changed only in the color panel. Switch between picking the raw color value or a variable/​style with a Shift key or creating and applying a new color variable/​style by using the shortcut Command-Shift. See an in-depth demo from Ana.

This update is near and dear to my heart, as I talked about color formats and working around a lack of support for styles in an eyedropper back in 2023 at Config. Love that both features are now so straightforward to use!

A few small improvements to variables, the biggest being the ability to copy and paste (but not move) variables across collections and show their values on hover. Other updates improve the authoring experience by adding new variables under selection, tabbing through fields, and resizing columns. See a video demo from Chad Bergman or read the release notes.

These improvements are very welcome, but after a year of using variables, I still rely on a mix of random plugins for most organizational tasks. My not-so-short wishlist for Config 2025: moving variables between collections and libraries, seeing where they’re used, replacing one variable with another, detecting unused variables, reviewing deleted variables still in use, and suggesting variables based on the value. Alright, 2026 might be a better target.

Easily create flexible, modular typography scales. Peppercorn generates a sample scale with a documentation sheet, text styles based on variables, and even generates code in a few standard formats.

Really well-made video tutorial explaining masks in Figma: ​“We answer questions such as: What is a mask? How does it work? How do you use it in Figma? We demonstrate advanced usage and share real examples from our projects.”

I covered October updates in the previous issue, but now you can watch the recording of the second episode of Release Notes with advocates Jake Albaugh and Kaitie Chambers.

New tools for managing no longer needed projects by moving them to trash, recovering, or permanently deleting.

A new analytics tool for Figma prototypes — create a unique tracking link that intercepts user interactions with your prototype and reports them back to you as stats and recordings. As a big fan of user screen recording tools, I’m looking forward to trying it out for testing.

Mark Foo from Figma shows how Dev Mode addresses common issues in design handoffs by providing a unified workspace where developers can access up-to-date design elements, annotations, and measurements directly within Figma. With features like version comparison, sandbox testing, and integrations like Code Connect and Jira, Dev Mode aims to streamline development workflows, improve efficiency, and foster a cohesive design and development environment.

Molly points to an unobvious benefit of using variables instead of styles for colors — de-scoping, or setting groups of colors to only appear as fill/​stroke options for certain types of objects.

This in-depth explanation of the font-size property continues the topic of web typography. Even if you don’t care about CSS, the text tools in Figma are based on web typography, so it’s good to understand how they work: ​“For accessibility purposes font-size is only a vague measure; readability and contrast cannot be derived purely from it. It requires something more along the lines of a ratio between font-size (as in height) and font-width — and font-weight on top. And then there are also the visual qualities of the font design that come into play; some typefaces are squiggly but decorative handwritten ones and some are minimalist functional sans-serifs.”