“Welcome to Figma Draw, a way to design precise-yet-playful illustrations, icons, and more. This playground file teaches how to use our new drawing and vector editing tools through interactive examples, and share some inspo created by product and brand designers using the new features.”

I don’t see myself using Draw much, but I’m so happy it’s here for talented artists like Mehak Samaiya.

Joel Miller, Design Manager for the Figma Draw team, shares his five favorite design details of the new mode.

“Figma is for practical business application.” The marketing team has been killing it with recent promo videos!

“Figma Draw pairs faster, simpler vector editing with powerful tools for visual expression — so designers of all stripes can bring their vision to life without breaking focus.” One thing I keep wondering about is how much visual design will change in the coming months. Medium and tools define the end result, and Figma just got way more powerful and artistic.

The new curved connectors mode for right-brained people. I’ll stick to my neatly organized ​“elbowed” connectors.

Displays Dev Mode annotations across all pages in a single list.

The design community never lets a good meme opportunity go to waste. ​“Figma slapped Swedish AI coding startup Loveable with a cease-and-desist warning for naming one of its new product features ​“Dev Mode.” It turns out Figma successfully trademarked the term Dev Mode in November last year, according to the US Patent and Trademark office, having introduced its own Dev Mode feature in 2023.”

Jay chats with Natasha Tenggoro who shows how she designed AI features for Figma Slides. You will learn about Natasha’s design process, AI design, designing shadows, design explorations for Slides and more.

Miggi breaks down his favorite features in Figma Slides, including automatically changing text color for accessibility, choosing slide templates from other decks, grid view, slide numbers, live interactions, and more.

Annotations are now available in Design Mode with new color-coded categories. Love that categories are fully editable, so you can adjust them to your team’s workflow.

The Pragmatic Engineer podcast: ​“How do you take a new product idea, and turn it into a successful product? Figma Slides started as a hackathon project a year and a half ago – and today it’s a full-on product, with more than 4.5M slide decks created by users. I’m joined by two founding engineers on this project: Jonathan Kaufman and Noah Finer.” Read two interesting takeaways from this episode on X.

Figma Slides is now out of beta and available to everyone with six major new updates: import and export .pptx files, object animations, slide numbers, components, and video improvements. Learn about new features from Noah Finer’s video or read how other teams adopted Slides to tap into a design system, use branded assets, improve collaboration, and get audience feedback.

The public rollout comes with a great commercial. Epic to see Soren Iverson in the main role!

While this video focuses on education, all examples can be easily translated into the work setting. Five creative ways to use pages in FigJam to bring structure, clarity, and collaboration: give each collaborator their own page, set up digital breakout rooms, organize content step-by-step, create resource boards, and keep everything in one spot for easy planning.

Nice built-in support for code blocks with syntax highlighting in Slides.

Rehearse is a clever plugin for Figma Slides — practice your presentation and see exactly how long you spent on each slide and the total time for your deck.

Plugins are now available in Figma Slides, and three dozen plugins have already been updated to support it.

A new sidebar provides a large collection of diagramming shapes for engineers, along with quick access to recently used ones. Stroke color is now independent of fill color for shapes and sections, and connector labels are movable. Additionally, there is an updated color palette with more variety and consistency.

Dev Mode users can now see variables used in gradients. Binding variables to gradients was also added to the plugin API so plugin developers can offer variables support out-of-the-box.