In addition to a bigger release, there are a bunch of good quality-of-life improvements: toggling between thin and thick markers with Command–B (lovely animation!), an addition of Paste to replace (Command–Shift–V) command to FigJam, and connecting two objects by simply clicking on one object followed by clicking on another.

A big update to FigJam — custom templates for your team, stamp your teammates’ faces to files and tag them with @mentions, emoji picker opens by typing a colon (“:”), custom color palettes (coming soon), UserTesting and Great Question integrations, Productboard widget, and new tunes! Also, explore new world-class teams’ templates and see a thread by Cai on the Figma design team’s rituals and templates they use in daily work.

Fascinating comments from Sho Kuwamoto, Figma’s VP of Product, on how plugins are implemented. Each plugin runs in a security sandbox — ​“We actually took a JavaScript VM, compiled it down to WebAssembly, and then we run that VM inside of the browser. So it’s a completely separate engine than the native JS engine. For security reasons, we don’t want two scripts running inside that VM, because then the two scripts could potentially have access to each other. And we don’t want to run two instances of this VM, for memory reasons.” 🤯

A new plugin for manipulating design elements to achieve interesting visual effects. ​“The plugin provides a wide range of features, including effortless horizontal and vertical movement, adjustments to size in both dimensions, rotation, duplication, and more.” See the demo video to come up with ideas for specific use cases.

Great examples of automating grunt work with the Automator plugin.

A new video from Figma is going back to basics — what components are, why we use them, and how to create them. See also a couple more new tips on Component properties and Variants.

“Learn how to create an immersive parallax effect right inside Figma, in less than 15 minutes.”

Learn how to build a dual range slider that is adjustable using Auto Layout so you don’t have to create a ton of variants to show different options.

In this guide, Bruno Temporim Carneiro shares a method for structuring Figma components through nesting and organizing variants. This approach allows for easy modification and updates to components.

Tutorial from Samarth Jajodia on creating a cool animation with a few shapes, gradients, and blend modes with Smart Animate.

Cool technique from Nitish Khagwal for creating animated liquid mesh gradients.

A simple but fun technique for creating cool animations with mirrored components.

A quick demo of the sticky scroll feature introduced as part of the recent Little Big Updates.

Lauren shows how to create a micro animation (also known as micro interaction) using a heart icon. These interactions add a really fun touch, and I love that the tutorial uses a heart icon from another tutorial by Miggi.

Lauren Andres discovers an older feature ​“delete and heal” to create smoother vector lines.

Fons Mans is back with a new tutorial on how to create a glowing glass effect in Figma.

Hold the Spacebar when moving an object to ignore Auto Layout.

A good tip from Jan Toman on color-coding different types of components inside a Figma library, which allows everyone to identify the component’s source and set the right expectations from these components.

MDS with a great shortcut of double-clicking on a layer icon to zoom into selection.

On a similar note, this thread by Luis is a great walkthrough of debugging, reducing complexity, and refactoring a tricky variant component. The core part of his approach is slicing everything up into composable parts.