Rasmus Andersson was one of the early designers at Figma and greatly impacted how it looked over the years. His thoughts on the redesign: ​“Not a fan of the floating sidebars, the rounded icons or the tiny layer hit targets, but I think pretty much everything else is good.”

Luis shows some of the original designs for the component icon by Rasmus Andersson. At this point, it’s hard to imagine anything other than ❖, but I also like #7 and #14.

An interesting comment from Rasmus Andersson on how the design team at Figma works. Many people get anxious when collaborators or viewers appear in their files in the middle of work. There must be a better way than moving files between private Drafts and public files. (Personally, I’d love to see something similar to the git push command developers use — privately work on changes, then when you’re ready send them to the public file. This would obviously affect multi-player collaboration, but sounds like an interesting challenge to think about.)

Rasmus, who used to work on this at Figma, shares his workflow for designing in P3 color space and exporting assets in sRGB. Sadly, it’s still a very tricky process.

Rasmus Andersson shows how to make a simple font in Figma.

Branching is now available to teams on the Organization plan. It was announced in April at Config 2021, but according to Rasmus Andersson, it’s been in the making for 5 years. The lack of branches was the main issue when my team switched from Sketch and Abstract to Figma in 2018, so I hope it will become available on the Professional plan one day.

Interesting discussion about exporting assets with a Display P3 color space from Figma. I wasn’t familiar with Export PNG with Color Profile plugin (see below) or an option of assigning an ICC profile to the exported PDF.

Rasmus Andersson shares a few hidden Figma tips. His second tip on adding viewer=1 to the URL query part to load a file very quickly in Figma’s lightweight ​“viewer” renderer is something I may use in the future.

Love this quote: ​“Great software is not built in months; it often takes a long time to get things right enough for a first version.”

Speaking of Auto Layout, this tweet by Rasmus Andersson (Figma’s Staff Designer in the past) and the following discussion in replies provides an interesting look into why the items in an Auto Layout go backward and why this probably won’t change soon.

Rasmus joined Figma in 2016 as a Lead Designer and one of the early employees. He just left the company, and in this post looks back at what he worked on over the years.

Can’t wait to see what they’ve got!

Pretty cool to see all the unexpected use cases for Figma that teams are coming up with.