Using variables to create a night and day version of the same illustration. Love this approach!

Molly Hellmuth suggests building small design habits in a new year that will make future you grateful — sticking to one naming format, avoiding groups, adding thumbnails to files, naming all your layers (good luck!), and unifying the name of your icon shapes.

Rafal Tomal wrote a simple guide for non-designers like content creators, copywriters, marketers, and others who want to be able to create quick graphics on their own without learning all the advanced Figma features: ​“At the end of this guide, you’ll know how to create your own file in Figma, set up the frame (the artboard for your image) at the size you need, add some text and images, and export it to PNG or JPG.”

A large profile of FigJam AI in Fast Company. ​“Figma’s AI ambitions are clear. Singer noted that ​‘we really do think of AI as playing a central role across the entirety of the platform.’ In theory, that could mean not just better meetings, but more capable coworkers. ​‘In a collaborative environment where you’re working with many people on a project,’ Singer says, ​‘AI really up-levels everyone.’”

“All the essential resources for setting up the design system.” A solid guide and a collection of interviews with design systems practitioners.

Fascinating side-by-side comparison of Midjourney 5.2 and the newly released version 6. The generative art from Midjourney has always felt more realistic and interesting compared to other services, and now the gap appears even larger.

John LePore is ​“designing the future” through his work on futuristic interfaces for films, video games, and the automotive industry, including the Hummer EV. He offers his own take on the recently announced Porsche’s bespoke interface for Apple CarPlay. Great presentation and deep thinking behind his choices.

A free and ever-expanding design system and UI kit for Figma from Lemon Squeezy. Fantastic resource from a talented team!

Molly Hellmuth recommends dividing design system assets into four files for increased flexibility and improved performance. These include Foundations, Icons, Components, and a separate design file with ​“local” assets.

I wonder what that button on Jordan’s micro keyboard does?

Soleio, an early designer at Facebook, is now one of the best-known designers turned investors. He shared a story on the Design MBA podcast about investing in Figma’s seed round in 2012, which became his highest-performing investment.

The official Font Awesome Icons plugin is here! The free part of the collection was always available as a font in Figma, and they shared a popular icon component in the community, but the plugin provides full access to the Font Awesome account, search, and tens of thousands of icons in SVG format.

CVS Health Inclusive Design team: ​“Accessibility annotations help capture design intent that cannot be conveyed through visual design alone. This can help prevent many accessibility issues earlier and create more usable digital experiences. After 2 years of testing with over 65 design teams at CVS Health, we’re releasing our Web Accessibility Annotation Kit to the public.”

Vijay challenged himself to create a small set of icons in 2 minutes — that’s just 12 seconds per icon! My takeaway is the importance of a good starting grid template (like this one from Font Awesome) that saves a ton of time and helps with consistency.

A new long-read from Luis Ouriach published in the Smashing Magazine: ​“Design systems can be of immense help, but failure to adopt them invalidates the hard work that goes into building the thing in the first place! In this two-part series of articles, Luis shares his experience with design systems and how you can overcome the potential pitfalls, starting from how to make designers on your team adopt the complex and well-built system that you created to what are the best naming conventions and how to handle the auto-layout of components, indexing/​search, and more.”

“Best-in-class Design Systems with components and foundations references from top-tier tech companies and leading UI teams.”

“Transform your plugin ideas into reality in just minutes! Featuring official Figma color variables, dynamic interactive components, ready-to-use promo material presets, and a live preview across 3 stunning themes.”

Stripe Press makes the most over-the-top, beautiful, intelligent, and delightful books and websites. I pre-ordered this edition after it was announced, and was saddened by the news of Charlie Munger’s death just a few days before the book came out and a few weeks away from his 100th birthday. Thanks to Stripe for making the web edition free and open to everyone.

Huge Icons shows how to quickly create a few common icons using a standard grid.

A super useful video from Akbar, a Developer Advocate at Figma: ​“Want to sync your Figma Variables with your codebase? In this video, we’ll show you how to use our Variables GitHub Action example repo to sync your Figma Variables to your codebase and vice versa.”