Raquel Piqueras and Christina Yang from Microsoft on organizing Figma files and making a few intentional changes which resulted in fewer meetings, higher quality work, a more agile environment, and a few praises from their partners along the way. (Thanks for sharing the friend’s link!)

The brand new kit with the evolution of Microsoft’s design system. Supports variables, theme switching, and uses memory more efficiently.

At Microsoft, Figma is winning over Adobe XD as their design tool of choice. Jordan Novet wrote an interesting profile for CNBC showing how several acquisitions and internal demand led to its rise in popularity, even while Microsoft and Adobe have worked together for over 20 years.

“The Figma app allows your team to riff on ideas together in real-time, present designs to get stakeholder feedback, and share the latest updates with everyone — without ever leaving Microsoft Teams.” See also the conversation with Jon Friedman, Corporate VP of Design & Research at Microsoft, about collaboration, the importance of design systems and toolchains in freeing up time for ambitious work, and why it’s worth it to change a company’s culture — even if it’s hard.

Microsoft Design refreshed their entire library of Fluent Emojis last year, and now they’re open-sourcing them on Figma Community (see also parts 2 and 3) and GitHub. A staggering amount of work went into this set of 1,538 emojis and it’s definitely worth exploring. Every icon is available in multiple variants — 3D, flat, and high contrast. Beautiful work!

Josh Cusick shares how the Design Systems team at Microsoft built, maintained, and set up for people to contribute the Figma UI kit for Teams Component Libraries (TCL). He covers structuring pages, naming things, aligning with code, design tokens, and version control.

Kelly Gorr and Prasanna Gunuru, Microsoft. ​“Figma is a powerful design tool that is used by many designers across Microsoft. Building custom Figma plugins can unlock new capabilities, resources, and shortcuts that are tailored to enhance design processes. Kelly and Prasanna take you through what it’s like building Figma plugins and how they are used at Microsoft.”

This file contains character sticker sheets and illustrations from Microsoft Inclusive Design’s toolkit. They are commonly used when referencing Microsoft’s Inclusive Design methodology and the diversity in human abilities and preferences.

The team at Microsoft published a v2 of the Fluent System Icons toolkit. New sizes are available, with over 4.5k icons per theme. The new icons are built with Variants, friendlier, have rounded corners and simplified shapes.

A detailed look into how Microsoft is building a cross-platform Fluent Design System. They have an interesting take on building a Figma plugin to move away from fixed values and toward consistent design tokens that later translated into platform-specific code values.

The Microsoft team just published four files of icons and components for their open design system, Fluent, on Android, iOS, and web.

Figma’s online event with Cheechee Lin from Dropbox and Viktoriia Leontieva from Microsoft, discussing how their teams perform remote sprints and share the ins and outs behind their community templates, designed to help teams who are adjusting to remote design.

Microsoft released design and UI-related downloads for Fluent Design and Windows apps.