A free beta of the design system generator. Figr Identity helps set up styles and variables for color, typography, spacing, grids, radius, and shadows. Automate tedious work by generating a scalable component library and easily managing your design system.
Juno Jo kicked off the first Friends of Figma Atlanta event of the year with a guide through the process of constructing a consistent icon library for your projects. In his presentation, Juno explores how to harness the power of Variables to begin tokenizing your system, elevating your design workflow to new heights.
In another conversation with Andrew Hogan, Ritesh Gupta, CEO and Founder of Useful School, shares how he sees work changing, the value of different identities and ways of thinking, and AI’s impact on UX and design.
A slide deck with 100 Figma tips to make your design workflow smart, fast, and super productive.
This April Fun Day, Figma had some fun with cursors. “What better way to celebrate this icon of interaction than with a look back at digital eras through the decades? For one week starting this April Fun Day, you’ll be able to choose throwback cursors inspired by four aesthetics from internet history: We’re calling them 8‑bit, Y2K, Skeuomorphic, and Aero. Here, we reminisce about bygone trends and reveal how we brought these vintages back to life.”
Andrew Hogan, Head of Insights at Figma, talks to Bob Baxley, SVP of Design at ThoughtSpot, about his view on AI’s impact, why it’s so important to design tools well, and what we can learn from history and huge projects like the Apollo Mission.
Figma is bringing together the design systems community on April 16 to share new features, best practices, and a peek into what’s coming next in the half-day event. “We’ll share more about new capabilities to make design systems more powerful and easier to adopt, as well as features to connect your system closer to code. Our product sessions will dive deep into strategies for structuring and maintaining your system.”
Considering it’s only a couple of months until Config 2024, it’s pretty clear they will put a bow on some of the features announced last year. Typographic variables, anyone?
Weavely is the AI form builder for Figma. You can design a form in Figma, and Weavely will generate a working web form from it. It supports answer piping, conditional logic, AI form generation, and more.
Free 40-minute DesignCode course on designing a realistic smart home mobile app. The video explains using the Arc tool, dashed lines and stroke settings, boolean tools, Auto Layout, and more.
Tom MacWright writes about his experience building the Placemark plugin for creating vector street-level maps and Placemark Globe for rendering a globe. He covers several interconnected topics, including tracking usage, sandboxing, plugin architecture, and authoring flow.
Mark Bennett with an in-depth walkthrough of his process for creating CyberBlade illustration.
A guide to creating icons in Figma with a solid introduction to basic tools, grids, and approaches to designing a cohesive set.
I loved this article by Karri Saarinen from Linear on why redesigns are important and its sequel, “How we redesigned the Linear UI,” on tackling that kind of project. “This incremental way of building the product is hugely beneficial, and often necessary — though it unbalances the overall design, and leads to design debt. Each new capability adds stress on the product’s existing surfaces for which it was initially designed. Functionality no longer fits in a coherent way. It needs to be rebalanced and rethought.”
On paying off the design debt: “While the design debt often happens in small increments, it’s best to be paid in larger sweeps. This goes against the common wisdom in engineering where complete code rewrites are avoided. The difference is that on the engineering side, a modular or incremental way of working can work as the technical implementation is not really visible. Whereas the product experience is holistic and visual.”
On exploring the next version without considering practicality: “A secret I’ve learned is that when you tell people a design is a “concept” or “conceptual” it makes it less likely that the idea is attacked from whatever perspective they hold or problems they see with it. The concept is not perceived as real, but something that can be entertained. By bringing leaders or even teams along with the concept iterations, it starts to solidify the new direction in their mind, eventually becoming more and more familiar. That’s the power of visual design.”
Now you can use the power of AI to generate and expand mindmaps and create visual timelines in FigJam. See examples in the gallery of ready-made FigJam AI prompts.
Free website UI kit made by Framer?! You got my interest. “Easily transform your ideas into a fully functional, responsive, no-code SaaS website design within minutes using these free components for Framer and Figma.”
Blank is “the fastest Figma UI kit and design system for your projects.” It includes weekly updates, an extensive component library equipped with all the necessary stuff for your next project, tokens and variables support, light and dark modes, open-source icons, and ready-to-use layouts.
“App icon template for iOS 17. See your app icon in context. Editable app icons so you can borrow shapes and styles for your own creations. Made in P3 color space to assure accurate colors.”
Free plugin for generating linear, radial, and conic gradients interpolated in a variety of color spaces, yielding richer, more brilliant gradients. Live updating so you can easily view and tweak the results.
“Researcher Gus Griffin recently completed one year on artificial intelligence work at Figma. In this conversation with Figma’s Head of Insights, Andrew Hogan, Gus walks through AI feature fatigue, what people really want from artificial intelligence, and how his anthropology background helps him do his work.”
Fast Company calls Figma one of the “most innovative companies in applied AI” for boosting creativity and digital collaboration with the OpenAI-powered Jambot plugin for FigJam. Wild to think that it was born out of an internal two-day AI hackathon just eight months ago. (For additional context, see the above interview with Nilay Patel.)