An interesting take from Jacob, a co-founder of Pierre — one of the dev tools I’m most curious about. ​“Figma is where I go to approximate a finished product. World-class Product teams collaborate here on rough sketches with components built to track their perfectly engineered counterparts. […] Instead would love to see Figma start building their creative suite. Specifically, imagine a Figma engineering tool? Built from the ground up? With the same Figma principles? And built to be interoperable with their design tool…”

Loved Tom Lowry’s thoughts on designer-developer collaboration in this thread. I think most teams agree that the traditional process of throwing designs over the wall to engineers is broken and we need better tools, but I’m also cautiously skeptical of designers working directly with the source within the design tools. While this is already possible for marketing websites (hello, Webflow and Framer!), products and design systems bring a whole new level of complexity and challenges. This iteration of the Dev Mode seems like a first step in the right direction to me, but the road ahead is lengthy but bright.

After being introduced at Config 2023 last June, Dev Mode will move out of free beta on Wednesday, January 31. Last week, Figma showed improvements and features they’ve been wrapping up before the release. Annotations are a big one — ​“designers can share additional context, specs, and measurements that are connected directly to designs, and developers can easily see designers’ notes as they work, ensuring that they don’t miss any crucial callouts during handoff.” Teams that did this manually will save a ton of time and effort. (As the top comment on Reddit suggests, flow arrows are a missing piece for annotations and something I’d love to see brought from FigJam.)

The compare changes modal was redesigned to show diffs both visually and in code. This is one of my favorite features, and I wish it wasn’t limited to the Dev Mode. I duplicate frames to riff on ideas all the time, and the compare view is an incredible tool for reconciling the differences between the two versions.

Enterprise customers can set plugins to run by default in Dev Mode for all files in their organization — ​“for example, you may want to check that you’re using a design system correctly, show links to design systems documentation, include information about internal APIs to use, or confirm whether a design uses components that already exist in your codebase.” Finally, the Figma for VS Code extension was redesigned to run plugins and improve the navigation and discoverability of design files. Instead of having to pan around a large canvas, you can easily select from a grid of frames and see frames individually with a focused view.

Common keyboard shortcuts for developers to perform actions like zooming, dragging the canvas around, copying the link to a specific screen, selecting the parent of your selection, exporting selection, and toggling a layout grid.

Jenny Wen ​“templatized” some of the frameworks she’s been using over and over again in her role as a design manager and pillar lead of FigJam. There are 11 FigJam (no surprise!) templates for strategy, managing, and meetings.

A large profile of FigJam AI in Fast Company. ​“Figma’s AI ambitions are clear. Singer noted that ​‘we really do think of AI as playing a central role across the entirety of the platform.’ In theory, that could mean not just better meetings, but more capable coworkers. ​‘In a collaborative environment where you’re working with many people on a project,’ Singer says, ​‘AI really up-levels everyone.’”

A new code plugin from Jake, Figma Developer Advocate: ​“This plugin allows you to write and generate code snippets for Figma nodes, which are rendered in the Inspect Panel in Dev Mode. You can make these code snippets dynamic, by referring to parameters provided by the plugin. Doing this for your component library will bring accurate code snippets to any project that incorporates your design system.”

A new FigJam icebreaker for the season — making snow friends from a set of accessories and snowball sizes.

Miggi, Mal, and Lauren’s first reactions to using the new mind maps feature in FigJam.

As of last Thursday, mind maps are now live in FigJam!

“Discover how you can import all of your existing Jamboard files to fully editable FigJams! From sticky notes to sketches, watch as we demonstrate how to seamlessly transition your Jamboard content into FigJam, where you can harness the full range of FigJam’s interactive capabilities.”

A workshop by Miggi and Alex exploring ways to use FigJam like a pro, including shortcuts, deep-dive features, and ways to speed up your workflow — both independently, and when collaborating with others!

The Dev Mode team shares their early pivot away from a codegen-first approach, the acquisition of Visly that accelerated their efforts, and what it means to break down the handoff wall.

A new plugin from Lichin Lin turns your FigJam table into a beautiful and editable bar chart. See a short demo of how it works.

Peter Yang interviewed Yuhki Yamashita about building FigJam AI, creating a culture where PMs and designers love their craft, making design accessible to everyone, and balancing new and power user needs. Most of Yuhki’s advice in this interview is for PMs, but it still applies to any product designer. (The interview is paywalled, but there is a lot of good stuff in the preview.)

Love this story about FigJam’s early days: ​“We had a meeting with our board two months before we were going to launch FigJam. The board asked us what our differentiator was since there were many other whiteboard tools. And Dylan said, ​“Well, it’s fun!” But then we realized that the product wasn’t fun enough. So the FigJam team ran a sprint called ​“FunJam” to come up with all the playful features that you see today like cursor chat, emotes, and more. So you’re absolutely right – fun was a core principle. Most workplace tools are a little boring and confine you in a box. We want to give you an inviting canvas with many lightweight ways to express yourself.”

The AI is now integrated into FigJam to ​“help you instantly visualize ideas and plans, suggest best practices, and, of course, automate tedious tasks, so you can focus on the bigger picture.” What started as an experimental widget Jambot is now a first-class part of the product using GPT‑4. I used it this week to create a structure for a presentation which was a useful 0 to 0.1 progression. You can give it a try at the playground or check out how Zander Whitehurst uses it to create crazy flow charts.

“Join this learning session where we will share tips and address questions around how to onboard your engineers to Dev Mode. We’ll cover how to adjust your workflows to get the most of our new features, setting up your files and design system, and onboarding your developers.”

Jake Albaugh and Emil Sjölander discuss using AI-based code generation (codegen) tools for augmenting your design to development process, not automating it. ​“Codegen isn’t just an automated, hands-off replacement for translating design to code; it’s best as an augmentation for you to more quickly understand design changes, and to keep your team in sync.”

Molly with step-by-step instructions for using rem units in your text properties. The developers on your team will be grateful for using the same units as they do when it comes to the handoff time!

In the last 2 months Figma quietly shipped more than 200 updates to the Dev Mode workspace 🤯 This article goes through the most important 35 changes and improvements.