Amazing intro video of the 5x faster comment replies in the updated mobile apps. See also the comparison of performance before and after this release.

Developer Advocate Jake and Designer Advocate Lauren have an insightful conversation about strengthening relationships between designers and developers. I love Jake’s point that trust is essential and we don’t need to understand every part of each other’s work to collaborate effectively. (Let’s hope Figma Detached is a new series, as I want more!)

In this Study Hall, Miggi covers several ways to add/​edit images in Figma and demonstrates how to upload a video to use when prototyping or presenting.

Tutorial Tim shows how the ​“Simplify all Instances” feature reduces an overwhelming visual overload in the Properties panel.

So many great ways to warm up the room in replies to Femke. I’d love to try This or That, play two truths and a lie, draw blind contour portraits, or look for common ground with my team.

Tru Narla, Software Engineer at Discord, shares some quality tips on using Figma as a developer — Inspect panel, copying code snippets, and exporting full-sized assets.

Luis with a cool technique for adding focus rings to a button using an absolutely positioned component instead of a shadow hack.

I mentioned the FigGPT plugin in the last issue, and now Edward Chechique wrote a detailed walkthrough of using this plugin. It requires an OpenAI API key but then provides direct access to ChatGPT prompts and tools for UX writing directly from the Figma document.

Danny Sapio with a few tips on working with paths, anchors, and fills to speed up your drawing workflow in Figma. This article is also available in a video format on YouTube.

Denislav Jeliazkov tested more than 500 plugins and collected a list of 102 that he keeps coming back to.

Is this an important update? No. But is it fun? Hell yes! The FigJam team keeps delivering the most delight per buck.

While I don’t often prototype interactions, I love the demo of all the use cases in this thread by Ana Boyer! Engineer Jediah Katz is also dropping some tips and tricks and Zander Whitehurst made a cool demo. Don’t miss the sticky scrolling playground file as well.

I hope this is the first step to batching all comments into a daily digest for lower-priority files 🤞

Now you can align layers with layers inside a component instance. Check out the thread by Tom Lowry and don’t miss his detailed spec for different scenarios!

Nice! Markdown FTW.

Honestly, I always assumed that SVG bugs are just a part of the game and will always be here — not a surprising conclusion when 49% of imported SVGs relied on buggy features. In retrospect, it was a silly assumption considering SVG is one of only a few open vector formats. In this fantastic thread, Figma engineer Lauren Budorick shows how much work went into detecting, analyzing, and fixing these bugs. I didn’t realize that luminance mask support was a part of this work as well, and Miggi is already exploring creative applications for composited motion visuals in prototypes.

Component properties v2 are out of beta with the ability to bubble up and expose properties of nested instances. It’s also now possible to define a list of preferred instances for swapping. Great for selecting a subset of a larger icons library or working with card components.

“You can now more confidently approve library updates with a visual preview of the changes and the ability to apply them to individual instances and layers.” I don’t even know how I’ve dealt with the stress of accepting library changes sight unseen in the past.

While color and layer blend modes have the most noticeable previews, this update is a part of the larger initiative for adding previews to all settings. Previews were already added to Effects, and the team is considering supporting boolean ops, component props, and the font picker.

My guess is we’ll see hanging punctuation in the wild more often now. (Good luck, developers.)