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.

In this episode of the ​“Tech Chat” podcast, Luis shares his journey, shedding light on how he found his path to Figma and what it’s like to serve as a design advocate.

It’s time to re-share this plugin to help designers fulfill a New Year’s resolution of naming their layers! It uses AI to rename layers and is free and open-source.

A new version of a beautiful free icon set from Noah Jacobus. Now comes in 3 flavors — Filled, Hollow, and Duo. All 300 glyphs from v2 were redrawn for consistency and 300 brand new icons were added.

A new plugin from Designer Advocate Hiroki Tani for generating color variables from the palette on canvas. It creates a collection from the section name, modes from nested frames, and variables from rectangles.

A super detailed illustration with complex lighting and textures by Mark Bennett.

Incredible photorealistic illustrations made entirely in Figma by Anatole.

Short but awesome tips from multiple creators to work faster in Figma.

Luis wonders whether variables scoping provides enough semantic modification to justify removing explicit ​“background”, ​“border”, and ​“text” color variables. ​“What’s stopping us from maintaining a single, primitive set of variables, named as such (e.g. red-300) to match your developer’s framework, relying on scoping alone to bridge this gap?” (See the discussion in this thread on X.)

I also like this take from Nate Baldwin — primitive color palettes are inherently semantic because every lightness stop is knowingly created to be used for specific use cases. He supports this idea with examples from his work on Adobe’s Spectrum color palette.

Figma sent a sample of its Creator Micro keypad to an Ars Technica reporter: ​“OK, it’s fun, I’m saying. It’s fun to have a little box for little computer tasks, rather than efficiently doing them all through one slab you must memorize under pain of being considered unoptimized. Sometimes I just twirl the volume knob up and down, with nothing playing, because it’s fun to twirl a knob.”

Some of the industry’s best designers answer the question ​“What book should designers read and why?” I only managed to read six of these so far, but a bunch of them have been sitting in my queue for a while. Great project by Vincent van der Meulen.

Speaking of books, I’m in the middle of a work project involving data visualization and felt like I needed a refresher and a solid reference. I’m reviewing Edward Tufte​’s books (how are they not on the above list?!), but also landed at ​“Fundamentals of Data Visualization” by Claus Wilke while looking for an answer to a specific question. Seems like a highly practical book with clear guidelines. An entire book is available online for free and seems to be out of print, but after skimming through a few chapters I ended up ordering a copy from AbeBooks.

An episode of the In Depth podcast with Kyle Parrish, Figma’s first sales hire, who built the company’s zero-to-one sales engine from scratch. Figma now has more than 3 million monthly users. ​“When he joined Figma as its very 1st sales hire, Kyle was eager to hit the ground running and close deals. So he was caught off guard when CEO Dylan Field assigned him to work customer support for the first 4 weeks. But looking back, it’s a tactic that paid dividends.”

What a fun Figma launch video from 2016! That was way before I considered a switch from Sketch or even heard of Figma. (If you’re not familiar with Sandwich and Adam Lisagor’s work, check out their other commercials.)

A cool technique of using randomizer plugins like Random Swap Variants and Variants Randomizer to generate a set of unique illustrations from predefined components.

A similar concept, but inspired by the Lighthouse web dev tool. This plugin ensures your designs are ​“polished and stakeholder-ready every time, saving you from potential revisions and boosting your design confidence”. 3rd Product of the Day at Product Hunt on December 26th, 2023.

A new plugin to generate free vector globes — spin the globe in the plugin window to update the frame, and then you can customize the result, tweaking colors for countries and more.

“From lifelike portraits to objects and animals, craft any image you can imagine in just 5 seconds.” Won 2nd Product of the Day at Product Hunt on December 14th, 2023.

An interesting new plugin — get the AI design feedback on either the UX or UI of your mockups. I tried it on an unfinished design, and while some points were somewhat irrelevant, others were spot on. It’s free to play with and worth giving a shot.

Multiple icon collections by Zlatko Najdenovski, including a few free ones. Most of them are very expressive and unique.