Molly Hellmuth had Brad Frost, author of Atomic Design, as a special guest at one of the recent cohorts of her Design System Bootcamp course. Molly’s students asked him so many great questions that after the Q&A, he recorded a video answering them again for a wider audience. Topics include design systems, workflow, atomic design, the future of design systems, buy-in, designer-developer collaboration, personal development, and global design system stuff. 

The next cohort of Molly’s 5‑week course starts on January 13th, which is the last scheduled cohort for now. Molly generously offers Figmalion readers $100 off with the coupon code FIGMALION100.

Molly Hellmuth with a tip on using the ​“Ignore auto layout” feature to add a scrollbar to the menu, among other things. It’s one of my favorite features, making it easy to preserve Auto Layout while making designs more realistic and interesting.

Molly explains how to preserve color and style overwrites when building an icon library.

If you liked Molly’s advice and Q&A above, you’ll get a ton of value from her Design System Bootcamp. Enrollment ends on this Friday, November 8th. The end of the year is the best opportunity to turn any remaining educational budget into new skills. Figmalion readers get $100 off by using the coupon code FIGMALION100.

Molly points to an unobvious benefit of using variables instead of styles for colors — de-scoping, or setting groups of colors to only appear as fill/​stroke options for certain types of objects.

Molly Hellmuth hosted a Q&A with Lewis Healey, Lead Designer for Atlassian’s Design Systems. They discussed how 55 designers on his team collaborate with over 600 product designers and thousands of engineers, ensuring cohesive design through Figma-based foundations and a targeted 95% adoption rate of design standards. Lewis emphasized flexibility in component use, a focus on education through champions and office hours, and precise tracking with custom dashboards to monitor design system adoption across 20 products.

Luis and Molly discuss how every small and large decision was made in Figma’s Simple Design System.

Molly recommends organizing components with sections to provide a hierarchy in the Assets panel and allow viewing components with a specific background color. Pro tip: set a background to a ​“danger” color for deprecated components.

Brilliant tip from Molly Hellmuth — create a special text style for labels where line height aligns to your grid. No matter what variable is used for padding, the height of your UI elements will be a multiple of the base grid. (This is also a nice way to keep your labels aligned with icons.)

Molly Hellmuth shares daily discoveries while working on the UI Prep design system update. There are great tips on pairing heading and body sizes, clearly marking a default text size, avoiding hiding components with a period or underline in the name, scoping variables in bulk, establishing a set of ​“surface” colors, removing a focused state, and including a special data text style for tables.

June 25, 7:30–9:30 AM. ​“Make new connections while stretching your legs, soaking in the gorgeous bay views, and sipping on espresso. Molly Hellmuth and Socrates Charisis will guide you along a coastal trail with views of the Golden Gate Bridge. Afterward, we’ll enjoy some well-deserved coffee on the beach courtesy of Wix Studio!” 

Some colors have established semantic uses — green for positive feedback, red for errors, and yellow for warnings. But what happens if your brand is based on one of them? Molly looks at how Netflix & Lego, Spotify & Quickbooks, and Hertz & McDonald’s handle this challenge. Her takeaway: either embrace the situation and use the brand color for semantic values, or introduce a new distinct color shade (i.e. orange for errors), but do not use two similar colors for different needs.

Molly suggests it’s time to support multiple icon sizes with number variables.

Molly praises the Cmd+\ shortcut for showing/​hiding UI, and I want to expand her tip by adding that the Cmd+Shift+\ shortcut toggles only the left sidebar (Layers/​Assets). Keep in mind that Cmd+\ also works in the Present mode — Figma toolbar has been popping up and blocking the navigation in one of my prototypes, so discovering that it could be turned off was a big relief.

In case you said goodbye to Dev Mode last week, Molly Hellmuth recommends a few plugins to help fill in the gap — Annotate It, Print Variables, Frame History, EightShapes Specs, and Handoff Notes.

So excited for this episode of Ridd’s Deep Dives podcast with Molly Hellmuth! They get into the nerdier side of Figma and discuss adopting variables, making sure you don’t invest in a Figma strategy that you’ll regret later, Molly’s favorite design systems plugins, and how she’s building components differently in v8 of her UI Prep design system.

Molly Hellmuth suggests building small design habits in a new year that will make future you grateful — sticking to one naming format, avoiding groups, adding thumbnails to files, naming all your layers (good luck!), and unifying the name of your icon shapes.

Molly Hellmuth recommends dividing design system assets into four files for increased flexibility and improved performance. These include Foundations, Icons, Components, and a separate design file with ​“local” assets.

Speaking of Molly, only 2 weeks left to enroll in the upcoming cohort of her 5‑week Design System Bootcamp. I rarely recommend paid content, but have full confidence in her course as one of the most featured authors in this newsletter and creator of the popular UI Prep design system. Figmalion readers can save $100 with a coupon code FIGMALION100.

Molly Hellmuth shares a few tips from her recent talk ​“Design System Traps & Pitfalls” at Smashing Conference. Here are the five ways to de-risk variable adoption for your design system — create a map for your token structure, start using variables with numbers only, use variables and color styles together, stress-test new features, and roll out changes gradually.