Very creative use of Figma’s powerful features and custom plugins for building a board game.

“Building your own tools isn’t just for large teams. Join us as we talk to Daniel Destefanis, Product Design Manager at Discord, and Shaina Hantsis, UX/UI Designer at Avaya, about how to build private plugins with a limited budget and resources.”

Figma plugin analytics page.

Uber took a programmatic approach to create 256 new components for map markers. ​“By automating the construction of the markers, I was able to avoid human-error and efficiently generate the full set of variants. Programmatically testing the components allowed me to thoroughly validate them under multiple scenarios and be confident of their quality.”

I shared some of Jordan’s experiments before, but this one is truly magical. Let’s hope it will become a real plugin one day!

I didn’t realize how many popular plugins were made by the Discord team and started as their internal tools! In this blog post, Daniel Destefanis shares their approach to building tools to prevent design debt, spend less time doing repetitive tasks, and improve the developer handoff process.

A plugin concept by Jordan Singer for automatically applying Auto Layout constraints and resizing.

An epic blog post from Roman Shamin describes a better way of working with a dynamic color system and how to build an internal plugin that makes it possible.

“I struggled with the Figma Plugin examples to understand how to access data from the canvas and into my app. The Figma Plugin examples have a React application sample which sends data to the canvas, but not the other way around. While this is seemingly straight forward, I didn’t immediately absorb the explanations from Figma Plugin website. In retrospect, the way to do this is quite simple.”

Jason Jun shares the whole process of building a plugin, from the idea, to developing a data structure, interface design, and writing code. ​“The process of repeatedly finding relevant documents while using design tools can be cumbersome. This gap between the documentation and design tool seemed to be very suitable for a plugin to fill.”

Lennon Cheng shares his experience of creating Figma plugins to improve and automate the design process. He is a designer without much development experience, and this makes his take especially interesting.

A great example of building a simple internal plugin around your own design system to automate routine work.

Svelte components for building the UI of Figma plugins. May be a good and lightweight alternative to using React.

I shared some of Jordan’s experiments before, but this one goes much further.

Varun Vachhar walks readers through the process of building a simple confetti plugin from scratch.

Cory Etzkorn shares his experience with building Faker plugin. Overall it’s a good summary of work involved in shipping Figma plugin.

Node.js command-line utility to get live and historical stats for your Figma plugins. Great tool for plugin authors.

Yuan Qing Lim shares ten heuristics for crafting plugins for Figma, based on his experience of building over a dozen of them.

Great examples of solving your own problems and annoyances with plugins. The author also shares some good thoughts on plugins’ usability.

Thomas Lowry, Designer Advocate at Figma, wrote a recap of a session at Config on building your own plugins to help you and your team work faster. Great examples and use cases from GitHub, Atlassian, and Uber.