In this episode of Dive recorded at Config, Ridd talks to Figma design engineer Vincent van der Meulen about how the new Visual Search feature was born from a mid-project pivot. Don’t miss Vincent’s original pitch video for visual search in Figma.
A very timely episode of Dive, where Ridd interviews Jordan Singer live at Config about his journey from the Diagram acquisition to Figma’s 2024 AI release. In the middle, they discuss how Figma’s generative features work and why they needed to create a UI kit. (A funny inception moment — at 45:22, I’m coming into view to take this picture.)
Ridd shows his advanced Raycast setup. One thing I adopted immediately is the Figma File Search extension he recommended — what a wonderful time-saver! The Color Picker and Ruler extensions might replace some of the third-party tools I’ve been relying on as well.
Ridd explains how to make your components easier to use by exposing nested instances.
June 26th, 6–9 PM. “Fireside with founding designers at Instacart, Nike, Maven, and IFTTT.”
Ridd published a crash course on advanced Figma prototyping with variables. He explains when to use variables instead of variants and shows how to streamline the prototyping process by using variables to update UI elements without requiring multiple frames. Additionally, he prepared a community resource with slides and examples.
Ridd runs a free advanced prototyping crash course on March 29th.
Ridd with a step-by-step process for nailing dark and light modes in Figma. Love his way of thinking about counterpart colors on the opposite ends of the spectrum for specific use cases — texts, backgrounds, borders, and icons.
It's taken me over 4 years...
— Ridd 🤿 (@ridd_design) February 26, 2024
But I think I finally have the perfect method for nailing ☀️/🌙 modes in @figma
Here's my step-by-step process 👇 pic.twitter.com/tr2QJQZcxG
Jenny Wen is the founding designer at FigJam and the person who brought it to market. In this interview with Ridd, she shares invaluable insights about FigJam’s product strategy, adding delight to software, and attacking ambiguity early in the process.
Ridd goes deeper into one of the topics they’ve covered with Molly and suggests questions to ask yourself before committing to a new Figma feature or workflow. One common theme in all three of his “regrets” is complexity — just like in code, it can be considered a detectable “smell”.
What are we doing in Figma today that we’ll regret 6 months from now? 🤔
— Ridd 🤿 (@ridd_design) January 25, 2024
There's been some BIG regrets over the years...
And I think it's starting to happen again 👇 pic.twitter.com/pE8mAQu79a
So excited for this episode of Ridd’s Deep Dives podcast with Molly Hellmuth! They get into the nerdier side of Figma and discuss adopting variables, making sure you don’t invest in a Figma strategy that you’ll regret later, Molly’s favorite design systems plugins, and how she’s building components differently in v8 of her UI Prep design system.
Ridd recommends including little nav menus in high-fidelity prototypes so that viewers can easily inspect the different states of a page. Great advice and something I’m going to introduce to my prototypes!
Prototyping pro-tip:
— Ridd 🤿 (@ridd_design) January 2, 2024
When I'm sharing a high-fi prototype for feedback it helps to include little nav menus so that viewers can easily inspect the different states of a page 👀 pic.twitter.com/QlYI08bgrV
How to preserve a button’s volume across multiple themes? Ridd suggests combining brand variables with a style wrapper for reusing gradients.
We all want those juicy buttons 🤌
— Ridd 🤿 (@ridd_design) December 19, 2023
But how do you add texture while maintaining themeability in @figma ?
Here's a quick breakdown 👇 pic.twitter.com/MslvJ27mKz
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.
Ridd points out two common problems with UI kits (manual updates of shared attributes and maintaining multiple breakpoint variants) and shares a variable system to make your life way easier.
Ready to see how variables in @figma can level up your UI Kit?
— Ridd 🤿 (@ridd_design) October 17, 2023
Here's my system 👇 pic.twitter.com/IfiMnS1FHx
Ridd shares a few repeatable steps to start prototyping with variables — creating the variable you need, assigning the variable to the UI, testing the connection, and setting up your triggers.
If you're like me, you were a bit overwhelmed the first time you started prototyping with variables 😬
— Ridd 🤿 (@ridd_design) October 10, 2023
But once you master it you start to realize something...
It follows the same repeatable steps 👇 pic.twitter.com/aYO4me0Gmy
Something must be (hovering) in the air, as Ridd also shared his thoughts on selecting a color for the hover state with the right amount of saturation.
Came across these hover states today...
— Ridd 🤿 (@ridd_design) October 11, 2023
Notice how the grays feel kinda... off?
It's a mistake I see a lot 😬
Here's a better way👇 pic.twitter.com/BBVMB6Le9Z
Ridd is back with a video and a thread on choosing the right variable types for updating the state of components.
By far my favorite use case for variables in @figma prototypes is being able to update the state of a component 💪
— Ridd 🤿 (@ridd_design) October 6, 2023
But it took me a bit to wrap my head around the feature...
So here's a ~1 min video walking you through how it works (more below)👇 pic.twitter.com/KUd8lUkY2e
Somewhat related to the previous article, Ridd looked for a way to account for optical balance when icons are hidden from a button. Jordan suggested a smart solution of wrapping the label in an Auto Layout with an additional smaller padding that adds up with and without the icon.
More Figma nerdery...
— Ridd 🤿 (@ridd_design) August 22, 2023
I want to account for optical balance when icons are hidden from my button (so ideally you'd have less padding when an icon is present)
Anyone have a better solution than wrapping icons in a smaller frame and attaching the boolean there? pic.twitter.com/wxTMQQ64n5
Ridd interviews Luis Ouriach about using variables for his Deep Dives podcast. “Luis goes deep into strategies based on team size, provides naming guidance, and even breaks down how he thinks about structuring libraries with variables in Figma. Lastly, Luis shares a behind-the-scenes of his journey as a designer advocate and even gives a unique prediction for how AI will take shape inside of Figma.”