Ridd interviews Luis Ouriach about using variables for his Deep Dives podcast. “Luis goes deep into strategies based on team size, provides naming guidance, and even breaks down how he thinks about structuring libraries with variables in Figma. Lastly, Luis shares a behind-the-scenes of his journey as a designer advocate and even gives a unique prediction for how AI will take shape inside of Figma.”
Luis updated Figma’s public UI2 design system file with all the features and elements introduced since its last update in 2019. His process is fascinating to follow and shows how much work went into this little update! Also has some great tips on plugins and the organization of a large design system.
Luis Ouriach with an introduction to variables and a primer on how to structure your variable collections for single and multi-brand systems.
Continuing with taxonomy, check out this discussion about naming tokens for a toggle switch UI element. Don’t miss the insight from Ryhan on how Figma approached this in their UI2 design system.
Today's naming challenge 🎯 https://t.co/BKztou1KYp
— luis. (@disco_lu) July 4, 2023
Luis shares good tips and thoughts on using, naming, and organizing color variables, as well as setting up modes for themes. Additionally, he summed up all of the above into a Variable starter kit on the Figma Community.
Been asked a lot over the past few days about how to get started with colour variables, so here are some pointers 🖍️
— luis. (@disco_lu) June 30, 2023
Hope this is useful! pic.twitter.com/7OEpNh3v4m
An in-depth session by Designer Advocate Luis Ouriach and Design Systems PM Jacob Miller on how you can level up your design system in Figma for better scalability, theming, and more using variables.
Luis Ouriach made a starter kit for documenting your components and tokens on the Figma canvas. “With this method, we take a set of core styles (primitive tokens), and then “alias” them into tokens specific to components. It’s worth noting that aliasing is not technically happening, we are using the hyperlink feature within Figma to link from our semantic, component tokens back to the primitive styles within the same file.” Love seeing a Designer Advocate publishing a token starter kit a few weeks before Config 👀
A useful freebie from Luis Ouriach — 360 badges, pills, and tags in the full-color palette range.
In this video, Darshan Gajara from Consistent Creators podcast talks to Designer Advocate Luis Ouriach about his role at Figma, overcoming burnout, building an audience, and the breakdown of his viral Twitter threads.
On a similar note, this thread by Luis is a great walkthrough of debugging, reducing complexity, and refactoring a tricky variant component. The core part of his approach is slicing everything up into composable parts.
Last week I was asked by someone in the Figma community to help debug and refactor their variant component
— luis. (@disco_lu) April 25, 2023
So I'm going to try and walk through how I did it! Let's see if it works as 1 million tweets 🐦
The short answer is: components everywhere pic.twitter.com/DKgjC5oNWg
Luis with a cool technique for adding focus rings to a button using an absolutely positioned component instead of a shadow hack.
Quick tip on creating proper focus rings on components ❖
— luis. (@disco_lu) April 4, 2023
Set up a "focus ring" component, and then use absolute positioning, combined with left/right and top/bottom constraints to make it stick to the edges
Bye bye to shadow hacks 👋 pic.twitter.com/khTfVY5IBa
Luis keeps digging into different ways of structuring Figma libraries and styles. In this thread, he thinks through naming conventions on styles and explores the pros and cons of more abstract and specific naming conventions.
Here's another thread about managing Figma styles 🗂
— luis. (@disco_lu) March 16, 2023
It's pretty hard to know how far to push naming conventions on styles, and you can end up in some heavily nested folder structures if you're not careful
So let's take one component and work it out! pic.twitter.com/cO30LFzAd8
Luis shares a few tips on structuring library files. He recommends optimizing variants for searching and usage rather than maintenance, and suggests this file structure: Page → Section → Variant. Also, check out his other thread on naming and splitting your library files.
We spend a lot of time talking about component structure, but the library files themselves are often ignored
— luis. (@disco_lu) February 27, 2023
So what goes into structuring a good Figma component library?
Here are a few tips, hopefully a good starting point 📈 pic.twitter.com/2zL7xk9eSx
While Figma doesn’t have native support for color tokens yet, Luis kicks off a discussion of how they might work in the future. His approach is similar to how I usually organize color tokens in CSS, so hopefully that will be the direction they take!
There are a lot of questions at the moment about colour tokens and Figma soooo
— luis. (@disco_lu) February 15, 2023
I thought I'd thread some thoughts on it to create a healthy discussion in public 🧂 pic.twitter.com/M2SINRwMER
Luis Ouriach wrote a massive multi-part guide on structuring teams, organizing projects, and managing files in Figma.
Luis is experimenting with a different way of managing styles in Figma. He argues that bringing styles a lot closer to their usage makes it easier to understand the context.
I'm playing around with the idea of managing styles in Figma slightly differently
— luis. (@disco_lu) January 17, 2023
Let's take a look at:
• Styles as components
• Contextual, semantic styles
• Simulating "aliases"
• HSL colours
🔎 pic.twitter.com/ZIA7qzI7Hl
An interesting technique from Luis on using component props for adding spacing around icons only in some instances, for example when used inside a button.
How can you use component props for contextual spacing?
— luis. (@disco_lu) October 4, 2022
For example, an icon that needs a 12px margin in *some* instances?
– Create a spacer component
– Place that inside a wrapper component for your icon
– Nest that one inside your main component
– Bubble up the props pic.twitter.com/KUv1oX05zs
Luis shares jumping-off points for starting a new design system in Figma.
If you're looking to start a fresh design system within Figma, here's a jumping off point:
— luis. (@disco_lu) September 23, 2022
1️⃣ Team for design system
2️⃣ UI Kit project
3️⃣ Separate files for: Styles, Icons, Components
*️⃣ Extra platform-level libraries if your developers are split into platform teams pic.twitter.com/je5UCOpI78
Luis on why it’s important to optimize for the usage of components.
Something I'm see a lot is that we prioritise component *creation*, not *usage*
— luis. (@disco_lu) September 13, 2022
This usually ends with something like this (simple example). Building is easier, but usage harder
The "notification" component is buried in variant settings. It's also a different component! pic.twitter.com/R5s63ptJ4w
Luis shows the only Dynamic Island notification we’ve been waiting for.
Wow I love how collaborative this Dynamic Island is pic.twitter.com/wO8SFs6GaQ
— luis. (@disco_lu) September 8, 2022