Ridd discusses a few key principles for using base components: How often are you iterating on the component? How complex is it? Avoiding problems with Interactive Components. Pairing primitives with slots. Bringing in base components early on to speed up the process.

Joey Banks shares how he typically names Variants in Figma and the approach he tries to take whenever he is feeling stuck.

What a great idea to let community members nominate their favorite resources. Looking forward to see the winners on May 11th at Config!

Tabs now show new Figma, FigJam, and prototype favicons. Using an emoji in the file name automatically updates the default icon. Tabs also can be pinned to the left side of the tab bar or dragged out of the existing window to create a new one (super useful for keeping an actual-size preview while working zoomed in).

“These fixes improve the user experience for users who only have access to the branch, so that they can more effectively work within the branch and are less likely to face errors.”

More ways for teams to customize their workspace and freely express themselves: organize documents into Sections, more colors (including adding your own!), sticky note resizing, and more.

Dylan Field shared three steps that Figma takes to become a more global company. First, Figma incorporated in Japan, set up an office in Tokyo, and started working on localizing Figma into Japanese. Second, they’re expanding in EMEA by opening offices in Paris and Berlin. And last but not least, Figma finally added support for RTL languages! Great news for designers working with Arabic, Hebrew, and Urdu who relied on 3rd-party plugins in the past. See thread by Lauren Budorick on why implementing RTL support was a huge undertaking.

A few typographic updates: the new default font size list (finally including 16px default on the web!), Inter replaced Roboto as a default font, and support for faux superscripts and subscripts that can be applied to any font — check out Tom Lowry’s behind the scenes deep dive for juicy details.

Manually update widgets that are already placed on a board.

Several updates to make brainstorming and diagraming even easier in FigJam: a simplified toolbar, text resizing, sticky stamps and highlights, image borders, and more.

Another drawing challenge from Miguel. Love the simplicity of his approach and how well the icon has turned out. 

How would you create a spiral in Figma without any external tools? Miggi’s answer is in the thread, but some of the solutions from others are really smart and creative too!

Anton Kuznetsov shares two workarounds for creating negative spacing with Auto Layout. The easy way is to use Space Between, but there are some limitations, so Anton offers using a frame as a wrapper.

Performance updates are always welcome: ​“We’ve reduced the amount of CPU usage FigJam and Figma take up. Large files with many users should run more smoothly now.”

An official Community resource for the popular Automator plugin. Explore automations made by the community and remix them to work best for you.

Create, attach, and update tracking events in your Figma files.

Discover, design, and discuss memes while using Figma with this plugin.

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.