Vice President of Product Sho Kuwamoto and Product Designer Nikolas Klein walk us through the journey of multi-edit. Love this observation: ​“When you look at Figma, almost every feature that helps you structure your file has a free-spirited cousin feature for the times when you want to keep things loose. You can use styles and tokens to change your colors quickly, but if you want to leave things unstructured, you can use the selection colors feature to make mass edits. You can use auto layout to group things into stacks and move them quickly, but if you want to leave things unstructured, you can use the smart selection feature to reorder things quickly. When it came to editing, you could use components to edit multiple copies of an object quickly, but if you wanted to leave things unstructured, we just didn’t have a great alternative!”

In a follow-up to the above interview, Niko and Garrett share what it means to establish a ​“prototyping culture” in your company and why it matters. ​“Prototyping creates an interactive experience that brings the product to life, revealing interactions that might be overlooked in static designs. When integrated into the product development process early, it saves engineering time and streamlines workflows. Adopting a prototyping culture fosters innovation.”

Ridd interviewed Nikolas Klein and Garrett Miller from the prototyping team at Figma. Together, they provide a behind-the-scenes look at everything that led up to the advanced prototyping release at Config 2023. For a few takeaways on two types of prototypes and the use of variables, see this thread by Ridd.

Niko shares how advanced prototyping came from a vision in June 2022 to reality at Config 2023. The team had to ship variables, multiple actions, expressions, and conditionals simultaneously to make it happen. This release is a huge achievement and the team should be celebrated for it.

Software Engineer Jon Kaplan, Product Designers Nikolas Klein and Chia Amisola, and Prototyping Product Manager Garrett Miller talk about the newly announced advanced prototyping features.

State management is now standardized for prototypes using interactive components, scrolling, and video so that Figma can memorize the state, share it across the frames, and offer a way to reset. See a deep dive by noodles expert Niko on how to use the new features. (Also, this is my kind of joke.)

“Prototyping in Figma just got an update. In this livestream, Designer Advocate Ana Boyer and Product Designer Nikolas Klein will walk you through adding videos to prototypes, how to build and edit multi-flow prototypes, faster, and demonstrate how to bring others along. Community members Mirko Santangelo and Jannis Smesny will also join to demo how they use the new features.”

A piece on why businesses should adopt a design-centric mindset to ensure success, with commentary by Nikolas Klein, Product Designer at Figma since 2018.

Love this behind-the-scenes video of Nikolas Klein and William Wu from Figma experimenting with how fast they can set a spring animation based on a feeling.

A first-hand perspective by Nikolas Klein on designing and building Interactive Components.

A few more fantastic Interactive Components usage examples from Nikolas Klein.

Niko tweeted a quick recap of his talk.

Figma will now preserve all supported overrides, including overrides to fill and stroke properties, and blur or shadow effects. This Twitter thread provides some context on how the new implementation works with text overrides.

Don’t miss a response from Nikolas Klein, showing how to resize objects while respecting the distance between them.