Dan & Xiang demonstrate what you can do with the LottieFiles Figma plugin.

A cool explainer of impressive interactive effects made with Figma, Spline, and Anima.

In this tutorial, one of the designers from Noun Project gives a few quick tips on using Figma’s ​“Smart Animate” tool to animate icons in your UI.

One more service for publishing websites from Figma — love how vibrant that space is! Figment helps you add website effects such as videos, links, and animations to your Figma mockups. When finished, it publishes or exports your website’s code.

Makers is a Figma plugin to help you build and publish sites directly in Figma without writing any code. They even provide a few templates to speed up the process. Make sure to watch an impressive demo video.

A few improvements to the file browser. As you type in the search field, Figma now shows a preview of matching search results, sectioned off by resource type (files, projects, people, and so on). There is also supposed to be a new filter by a file type, but I couldn’t find it 🤷‍♂️

A curated list of automations for Jordan Singer’s popular Automator plugin.

The plugin allows you to create beautiful shadows by simply dragging a ​“light source,” which casts a shadow from selected elements. The shadow effect is achieved by layering and easing multiple drop-shadows to create a skeuomorphic shadow umbra and penumbra.

Four templates that may help ease the pain of the design handoff process — a table of contents, detailed specs, mockups, and flow templates.

“How can we update and test our design system components in Figma? With branching, we have a space to explore updates in our main library files while keeping the source of truth intact. And, with Swap Library, we can quickly change what libraries are being used in a file. Let’s take a look at how we can use these features together to iterate and test our components.”

Anton Kuznetsov wrote a detailed guide to creating components with customizable content, better known as ​“slot components”. This approach is the best way to reduce the number of detached instances in your project.

…and a few improvements to the plugins and widgets menus in FigJam.

A few bug fixes related to prototypes.

New Storybook plugin for Figma that lets you connect variants to stories.

Automator – the most discussed plugin lately – is now available to the public. For a limited time, it’s $29 per year for personal use. See Issue #52 for some examples of what it can do.

A really detailed guide by Molly Hellmuth on spacing and layout grid best practices based on Material Design, Bootstrap, and Figma.

Dan Hollick shares a few pros and cons of using Spacer components vs. Auto Layout.

Hosts of the Design Details podcast share tips for crafting component variants to avoid the dreaded variant-explosion problem.

Joey Banks shared a change in his approach to base components earlier this month on Twitter, and now goes into more details in his newsletter. I often end up with too much complexity because of over-reliance on base components, so this is a piece of welcome advice.

“Now Org Admin will also see secret teams in the Teams tab of the admin console, so they have visibility into all the teams that exist in the organization. The content in secret teams will remain secret to its members.”