Draftocalypse seems to be over, but it’s still worth sharing this video that Tom Lowry, Director of Advocacy at Figma, put together to walk you through what’s changing and answer a few common questions. 

In this insightful video essay, Tom Lowry shares some thoughts on freeform design exploration without accruing design debt.

I’ve seen a lot of confusion over the removal of the Inspect panel and the introduction of Dev Mode, so happy to see a detailed walkthrough of the free viewer experience recorded by Tom Lowry. Pretty much everything from the old Inspect panel is still available for free, and Dev Mode builds on top of that foundation. While some will inevitably label Dev Mode as a ​“money grab”, I won’t be surprised if many teams will save money by converting full Design seats to standalone Dev Mode seats.

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.

Now you can align layers with layers inside a component instance. Check out the thread by Tom Lowry and don’t miss his detailed spec for different scenarios!

To answer some common questions about Component Properties, Tom Lowry re-recorded the little run-through that he did during one of the breaks at Config.

Tom Lowry gives a walkthrough of some of the new commenting improvements and enhancements.

Designer advocates Tom Lowry and Rogie King dive deep into some lesser-known capabilities of Figma’s prototyping tools.

Designer Advocates Tom Lowry and Rogie King talk about their favorite Figma plugins. Here is a list of all discussed plugins.

Thomas Lowry, Designer Advocate at Figma, wrote a recap of a session at Config on building your own plugins to help you and your team work faster. Great examples and use cases from GitHub, Atlassian, and Uber.

Thomas Lowry (Designer Advocate, Figma) on what happens when you open the entire design process to the greater cross-functional team, what he’s learned from talking to hundreds of design teams, and shares some of his own experiences of working on Figma at Figma.