Old news for our readers ;-) Hover over stamps to see who left them.
Easily size shapes to the same dimensions using new guidelines to match height and width.
Last but not least, we added size guidelines and snapping to make it easier to create and resize shapes, sections and images to the same size! No more guessing or eyeballing sizes, just look out for those purple guidelines! pic.twitter.com/0doTD2mf9c
— Peter Damrongpiriyapong (@peterdpong) August 2, 2022
Stay in the diagram flow, with Connector tool (X) now persisting by default; hit Esc or V to return to the Move tool.
Next up, we made the connector tool persistent! No more creating one connector at a time, place all your shapes on the board, then connect and adjust with connectors all in one go! When you’re done, just hit Esc or V. pic.twitter.com/3jb2uB1Bca
— Peter Damrongpiriyapong (@peterdpong) August 2, 2022
Create shapes and stickies faster with new auto-create prompts at the top, bottom, left, and right.
I’m thrilled today to show off what I’ve been working on @figma — making diagramming more fluid in FigJam
— Peter Damrongpiriyapong (@peterdpong) August 2, 2022
First up are improvements to Quick Create! We now try to avoid overlapping with existing objects and made sure Quick Create indicators are always shown for fast diagramming! pic.twitter.com/OUARJDrtlZ
Another personal favorite! 📐 Connectors will automatically straighten when objects look center aligned — no more wonky lines!
Stay in the loop on notifications when you’re in the desktop app, with a new notification bell that lives in your menu bar. Install or update the beta app to the latest version.
Search preview now includes recent searches and a list view shows file owners.
After recently joining the @Figma product team in June, I’m super excited to share a few fun improvements to the search experience 🔎 that we’re launching today as part of Little Big Updates! pic.twitter.com/HjOy6ezMPt
— Manosai Eerabathini (@manosaie) August 2, 2022
Text alignment shortcuts (⌘-⌥-L for left, ⌘-⌥-T for center, ⌘-⌥-R for right) also work when you apply them inside the text box.
Navigate to links in comments without the interruption of an interstitial.
Retain formatting, including bullets and text styles, when pasting between text nodes.
No more group/align/ungroup — quickly align objects as a temporary group by holding Shift while pressing alignment buttons. (Option/Alt also seems to work.)
One of my favorite little big updates to drop in @figma this week is the ability to align objects as if they were a group.
— miggity miggity mac (@miggi) August 4, 2022
Hold the option (alt) key when hovering over the alignment icons to align selected objects together within their frame.
More here: https://t.co/8ZWii0Kcl2 pic.twitter.com/GbSnU5u2UB
Not mentioned in the blog post, but a very timely and important update!
We know it’s been too long — emojis have been updated in @figma (~1000 added)! While we were at it, we also improved the rendering, quality, and ease of future updates. Emoji on 🙌 pic.twitter.com/ayoAl5DwGS
— Qi Linzhi (@LinzhiQ) August 4, 2022
Get more efficient in your selection — if a top-level frame is selected, Figma will now select any subsequent top-level frames registered.
Annotation is a lot smoother with Pencil strokes no longer getting clipped or disturbing Auto Layout in frames. See also Marcin Wichary’s short thread on how they got to this solution.
Sometimes I feel happier about the little fixes than the giant new features. Using the pencil tool in clipped or AutoLayout frames pretty much always did the Wrong Thing. Thanks to @mwichary for talking through all the little edge cases with me. pic.twitter.com/XKhuxXpjrX
— Michael Feldstein (@msfeldstein) August 2, 2022
Figma shipped a batch of lovely small improvements. See demo videos in their blog post, or read a full list with a few behind-the-scene links below.
One of my personal favorites 🙌 Organize the gradient panel faster by double-clicking on gradient stops to evenly distribute them.
This past maker week @figma I had some extra hours and worked on adding the ability to equally distribute gradient stops with a simple double click.
— trevor aquino 😶🌫️😰 (@TrevorAquino) August 2, 2022
However this wasn't my own idea. One of my favorite parts of Figma is being able to interact with the community of users.
1/2 pic.twitter.com/Pik8GXWyjy
Sprig makes it easy to conduct high-impact research with your users throughout the entire product lifecycle. You can easily run concept and usability testing on one or many Figma prototypes within the same Sprig study.
“In this livestream, Designer Advocate Clara Ujiie and Developer Advocate Jake Albaugh walk through how to use the widget code generator to design and build your own widget for Figma. You’ll also learn about how to use widgets to boost collaboration, manage your work, and level-up designs.”
“In this stream, Figma Designer Advocate Chad Bergman and Product Manager Jacob Miller share how to apply polish to your components and publishing a v1 of your library.”
Rogie comes to the rescue and explains how to preserve a fill color when icons are overridden and swapped. It’s worth keeping a layer name consistent across icons in the library if you plan to use them in different colors.
To get icon colors to preserve when they are overridden and swapped, you need to make sure that your layer names are the same. You'll see in this gif that add_circle and add_shopping_cart have the same layer name...that's how Figma knows to apply the override as you swap. pic.twitter.com/io8DZFtgBQ
— ˗ˏˋrogieˎˊ (@rogie) July 29, 2022