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

“Check out our nine Google Fonts pairings and start using them in your design projects. The pairings are hand-picked from Google Fonts catalog and open-sourced for everyone to use.”

“Tune in to hear Clara, Amanda, and Qi walk through how to get started and unlock more font styles. From optical sizing to slant, learn how variable fonts give you more design control and expression.”

An interview with Thierry Blancpain, co-founder of Grilli Type, one of the font foundries that were a part of Figma’s variable fonts beta.

Another great shortcut from Miggie to avoid going into the advanced type settings menu — click on the ​“Fixed size” icon while holding Option (Alt) to enable truncated text. (With so much free space to the right, I wonder what’s the justification for hiding this option in the menu.)

Figma built a fantastic interactive page showing great possibilities provided by variable fonts and how to use them in Figma. It’s been a year since Toni Gemayel built the Variable Fonts plugin, and I’m happy it finally became a native feature.

Dylan Field shared three steps that Figma takes to become a more global company. First, Figma incorporated in Japan, set up an office in Tokyo, and started working on localizing Figma into Japanese. Second, they’re expanding in EMEA by opening offices in Paris and Berlin. And last but not least, Figma finally added support for RTL languages! Great news for designers working with Arabic, Hebrew, and Urdu who relied on 3^rd-party plugins in the past. See thread by Lauren Budorick on why implementing RTL support was a huge undertaking.

A few typographic updates: the new default font size list (finally including 16px default on the web!), Inter replaced Roboto as a default font, and support for faux superscripts and subscripts that can be applied to any font — check out Tom Lowry’s behind the scenes deep dive for juicy details.

If the screenshot is real, this is an exciting rumor!

Great article by Christine Vallaure on improving accessibility by using relative font sizes in CSS, and how to work around pixel-based sizes in Figma. While I always use a combination of rem and em units, I wasn’t familiar with the 62.5% CSS hack or that units can be switched during hand-off in Zeplin. Very cool!

You can now mix different text sizes in the same text box, sticky note, or shape.

You can now adjust the spacing between listed items in the type details panel. Finally! Such a small but important change — I had to imitate this with an Auto Layout in the past.

Instead of mocking data with a bunch of rectangles in a rough prototype, use a specially designed font like Flow or BLOKK Neue.

Use bullets and numbers to organize information, emphasize important details, or outline steps. Check out the video by Anthony DiSpezio with a quick demo. Hope you caught the fun lists launched as an April Fools joke!