The lack of precision in the gradient tool is an old annoyance, but as this tweet grew in popularity I’ve been quietly hoping that maybe the fix would make it to the Little Big Updates. Regardless, the replies provide a ton of smart workaround — distributing stops through double-clicking, nudging stops, using the Precise Gradients plugin, and even looking in the Inspect tab!

This website made my head spin! A new Figma plugin and Framer Component for creating highly customizable beautiful moving gradients.

A new plugin by Vijay Verma: ​“The plugin utilizes the Metavatar algorithm to create stunning gradient backgrounds in a variety of cool colors. It also has the added feature of adding noise to make the gradients even more visually striking.”

In this tutorial thread, Fons Mans walks through the steps of creating Linear-like gradients. The community file is available as well.

Miggi with two great tips on managing gradients. I wish we didn’t need to resolve to a 100 pixels square hack, but often it gets the job done!

If programming shaders is a bit too much for you, check out this video on how to create an animated mesh gradient in Figma with a combination of a few plugins and built-in tools.

Dan Hollick with a fantastic deep dive on shaders. While this specialized area of graphics programming may seem too niche, shaders have been gaining popularity in UI design for animating gradients and creating cool special effects. In Figma, you can play with shaders inside Rogie’s popular Noise & Texture plugin.

One of my personal favorites 🙌 Organize the gradient panel faster by double-clicking on gradient stops to evenly distribute them.

Miggi shows how to use images as masks.

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

“Say goodbye to your drop shadow hacks. Now, you can apply individual borders to customize tables, lists, and single-sided panels.” This is one of my favorite updates!

Insert and retain the original resolution of big images, working around Figma’s limitation of 4,096 pixels during imports. Just last week, I had to add a few large screenshots to the project and ended up cutting them down manually in Pixelmator while thinking of building this plugin. Apparently, Yuan Qing Lim had the same idea a while ago!

While outlining a stroke is a common feature in design tools, I’ve never seen the opposite!

While this is still a hack, I didn’t realize that a big nudge value affects gradient stops. Good to know!

Cool plugin by Tom Quinonero for creating gradients through color spaces like LCH and ZYX with non-linear curves. There are so many cool use cases for color spaces like LCH — it’s a real pity that they’re not a standard part of Figma.

A Node package that converts SVG strokes to outlined fills as a post-export process. Useful if you want to manipulate color attributes in code.

Chromatic Figma lets you use other color spaces than RGB, such as Lab and Lch, to create good-looking and perceptually uniform gradients and color scales. Recently, I had to dive deep into color spaces and built my own tool while creating an accessible color palette at work, so it’s nice to find a plugin that can be used in less demanding situations.

Default Pencil and text colors are now smarter. When you draw or type, they are now black or white, depending on the background. Miggie shows this behavior in action.

Luis shows a few ways to crop images.

How to copy and paste an individual property for color or an effect.