The new series at Figma blog, Meet the Maker, kicks off with Marcin Wichary, a design manager from the Editor team. I wrote about Marcin’s book Shift Happens in issue #102 — since then, it became the #1 tech book of all time on Kickstarter and reached its final stretch goal! This is a lovely interview touching on many topics close to my heart — exploring niche interests, making things, experimenting, prototyping, getting feedback, and obsessing over details.

Marcin Wichary leads the editor design team at Figma and wrote some of my favorite deep dives on design-related topics (like underlines on Medium or fonts and line height at Figma). Now he is working on a gorgeous book about keyboards, ​“covering 150 years from the early typewriters to the pixellated keyboards in our pockets.” Shift Happens (what a name!) has already become the #3 Kickstarter non-fiction book of all time, and seems like it’s on its way to a stretch goal, unlocking a larger 3rd volume. Highly recommend listening to his recent interview on the Design Details podcast about the book, its publication, website, and more. Consider backing this project by March 9, 2023 to help it reach a stretch goal.

Marcin Wichary introduces twelve editor improvements. Numeric scaling is the obvious highlight and something many of us have been waiting for, but a new dialog for creating Styles and preserved formatting when copying/​pasting text are great too!

Annotation is a lot smoother with Pencil strokes no longer getting clipped or disturbing Auto Layout in frames. See also Marcin Wichary’s short thread on how they got to this solution.

Great stories and reflections from Marcin Wichary on bugs in software. ​“At Figma, there are many processes and tools to deal with bugs, including recurring Quality Weeks: time dedicated to coming together within a product team, and to fixing bugs that might otherwise get forgotten by time, bugs that deserve extra investigation, and bugs that stretch the traditional definition of bugs.”

This reminded me of another great post, ​“Debugging Misadventures: Down the Rabbit Hole”, by ex-Figma engineer Jamie Wong that I shared a while ago.

Marcin Wichary digs into how font fallback works. As always, his post is a deep dive into the topic. Highly recommend!

Marcin Wichary, Design Manager at Figma, gives an inside look into how selection colors and OpenType support were built.

Great thread from Design Manager at Figma on how one of its most unique features came to life, from the initial pitch to design challenges and decisions.