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.”

A large shipment of small updates to Figma and FigJam. The community file is the best way to learn about all of them with demos and examples, but see also the blog post with a list of updates.

Figma Designer Advocate Luis Ouriach talks to the UX Lead at Wix​.com Domas Markevičius about how they embed a culture of collaboration and communication between designers and developers.

Anthony DiSpezio goes deep on hexagons, and this has absolutely nothing to do with Twitter or NFTs.

“Over the past two months, we’ve rolled out a number of updates to comments in Figma. As always, insights about our users and how they design together informed these improvements. The data science team spearheaded experiments to learn how to encourage feedback and collaboration directly in the file. Here, Data Scientist Emily Jia shares the hypotheses, tests, and learnings that lead to this cross-functional, data-driven product launch.”

Quickly import and embed PDF files into your FigJam boards.

Generate a random confetti pattern on your canvas.

“Slots Components for Dummies” by Ridd, who is one of the biggest proponents of this approach. Great guide to one of Figma’s ultimate superpowers.

Cool walking animation by Bruno, Community Advocate for Figma in Portugal.

A new plugin by Framer. You can now copy layers in Figma and paste them directly into Framer to make your Figma projects interactive in just a few steps.

Cool (but creepy) character animation experiment by Miggi from Figgi.

Great example of a rich Figma prototype made with lots of cool interactions. See also a video on Alvish’s Twitter.

With all the discussions around composition-based design systems, Joey Banks provides a counterpoint on reducing complexity and increasing reliability with simpler variants.

This is really exciting! Many iPad users already know and enjoy the Figurative app, but having an official app will be amazing.

After discovering a bug in redesigned comments in November, their rollout was postponed for a month. Now they are finally available to everyone. If you need a refresher of what changed, this thread summarizes it well.