A short overview of the most important parts of Figma for developers.

Generative Art by Pawel Kontek is one of the coolest plugins I’ve seen in a while. It’s currently in beta and I can’t wait to play with it after it comes out!

Cool update to a LottieFiles plugin: ​“Instantly change the colors of your animation. Apply your own custom colors, or try out our carefully curated preset color palettes.”

That’s a pretty badass collection of shortcuts — I didn’t know most of them!

Supafast!

This deep dive into the making of the feature is my favorite kind of a blog post on Figma’s blog: ​“Building spring animations took our engineering team back to the classroom — to make animations that are both natural and accurate, we borrowed principles from physics. We’re excited to share the mechanics behind the movement, and the story of how spring animations bounced their way into Figma.”

Neat shortcut: ⌘-click on the Auto Layout padding field to adjust all paddings.

Rasmus Andersson shows how to make a simple font in Figma.

Andrei Iancu shared two more kits with loading animations — see also his really cool Kit 3 with delayed steps.

“Check out our nine Google Fonts pairings and start using them in your design projects. The pairings are hand-picked from Google Fonts catalog and open-sourced for everyone to use.”

“We’re excited to talk about yet another awesome new feature: Component properties. Join us as product manager Jacob Miller and designer advocate Chad Bergman share more on how you can reduce variant explosion in your design systems and improve developer handoff.”

“Learn all about the redesigned Auto Layout. We’ll walk you through how to use the new properties panel and on-screen controls, as well as showcase the new layout features like absolute positioning, negative spacing, and more.”

“Tune in to hear Clara, Amanda, and Qi walk through how to get started and unlock more font styles. From optical sizing to slant, learn how variable fonts give you more design control and expression.”

Layout FM podcast host Rafa is joined by special guests Joel and Oscar from Figma to talk about their work designing AutoLayout V4.

Ridd: ​“Switchboards are main components that have been pulled out of a chunk of UI so as to function as a single place to control all of the prototyping connections”.

Ridd warns that using component properties introduces a new type of responsibility for designers and explores what the most effective handoff deliverable actually looks like.

Luis shows a neat trick on how to create an ​“infinite table” using component properties, where we can toggle on however many columns or rows we need in designs.

A nice trick from Gleb on how to create a transparent fill that supports a background blur effect.

Follow Charli Marie’s live stream of working on a quote component and figuring out how to use Component Properties.

Molly Hellmuth with 5 step-by-step examples on how and when to use Component Properties.