In a short video, Ridd shows how to set up and use the Raycast Figma File Search extension to navigate your Figma files quickly.

Loren Baxter shares at Sneak Peek how to use Figma variables to design a dynamically colored UI for light and dark modes.

“Figgy instantly turns your FigJam into a website. You get a published site, with a clean domain and custom SEO. All you have to do is drop in your Figma link and it’s live. No coding or technical experience is required.” Read how this project came to life in this Twitter thread.

What a fantastic post from Paul Stamatiou! His observations resonated with me after working on multiple products from the early days. ​“There’s nothing glamorous about being a designer at a startup. It’s a role that frequently values speed and pragmatism over going deep in the craft. It’s not all big launches, viral tweets, building for happy paths, and clear-cut product requirements. However, it can be incredibly rewarding. The fun comes from being able to excel at learning new skills and wearing many different hats while being solely responsible for large efforts.”

Users in Enterprise organizations with workspaces set up can now publish libraries to a workspace in addition to a team or the whole org.

Ugic is a plugin for generating multi-language UI drafts from your component library. It can be trained on your internal components, which is key — more details in the plugin introduction.

“Dora AI plugin helps turn your website ideas into fully editable Figma designs, perfect for web designers seeking inspiration and efficiency.”

Highly realistic illustration, made entirely in Figma by Fabian Albert.

Adorable set of 73 unique, license-free pixel emojis.

A day before Config, teams from GitHub and Figma hosted a dev community event with lightning talks. The recordings are finally available.

In the first talk, Katie Langerman, Staff Systems Designer at GitHub, shares how designing, testing, and shipping new design tokens at scale without disrupting users requires meticulous planning and care. She discusses how the Primer design system team revamped Primer Primitives with a new naming convention and build process, connecting core Figma libraries with code.

Mizko shares his favorite Figma tips and tricks — using status and annotation kits, nested arrows in names, min- and max-width in Auto Layout, variable modes for breakpoints, coying a FigJam connector to Figma, making icons searchable, Auto Layout a parent frame, looping variables, and user variables.

Molly Hellmuth shares daily discoveries while working on the UI Prep design system update. There are great tips on pairing heading and body sizes, clearly marking a default text size, avoiding hiding components with a period or underline in the name, scoping variables in bulk, establishing a set of ​“surface” colors, removing a focused state, and including a special data text style for tables.

Recolor and remove colors from raster images with a solid color fill, like the Color Overlay effect in Photoshop.

A big update to the Tokens Studio plugin introduces W3C DTCG format support, new variables exporting experience, using variables inside styles, typography tokens, and more.

Christine Vallaure shares an updated list of her old favorites and plenty of new tips, highlighting what you might have missed when working with components in Figma. (Thanks for the friend link!)

“Spectrum, Adobe’s design system, already had a robust icon system, but the time had come for a redesign. Evolving a design system’s icons can involve updating and/​or redesigning assets, improving how icons are maintained and served to the teams using them, and creating a solution for adding, updating, and deprecating design elements within it. Months of discovery, exploration, reviews, and sharing laid the groundwork for the icon team’s three-phase process. It began with extensive design exploration and beta testing to confirm the needs of product teams, and ended with implementing suggestions for improving search, customization, and serving icons. It’s a method of inquiry, feedback, and refinement that other teams can apply to their work.”

Ridd on two big issues and two opportunities of designing with AI: ​“If I’m in my design tool it’s because something is in my brain (even if it’s just a simple sketch). That’s why I don’t buy the so-called ​“blank canvas problem” as a real pain point for professional designers. Pointing AI at this ​“problem” is really a way to expand the user base by lowering the bar for non-designers to participate.”

Kate Moran from Nielsen Norman Group demonstrates how to get better results from generative AI chatbots by writing ​“CAREful” prompts. Use the acronym CARE (context, ask, rules, and examples) to remember what information to give AI tools to achieve your desired results: include context, what you’re asking the system to do, rules for how to do it, and examples of what you want.

Christopher Butler wrote an essay on how details, focus, time, and taste elevate craft. ​“Attention to detail is not a personality trait; it is a manifestation of a preference for order and consistency. When that preference is fundamental, it makes it nearly impossible for a person to not see mistakes, flaws, inconsistencies, or differences. […] This is why attention to detail cannot (easily) be taught. Teaching a person to ​“see detail” requires them to care about and prefer certain forms of order.”

Happy birthday to my favorite design tool!