Articles

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics added “web and digital interface designer” to their annual report. Why it’s important: “The addition of web and digital interface designers as a category is a signal that BLS thinks the demand for this type of job has increased significantly, and that it will likely continue to do so. The agency has also revised projections for its old web developers and digital designers category; it now projects the category will grow almost 40% between 2020 and 2030, validating the demand that so many people working across the tech and design industries have been feeling for years.”

“In this tutorial, we redesigned SVBs banking dashboard using Anima’s open source Component Library for Figma, then connected our data using Strapi’s headless CMS. Now you can launch fullstack React apps at lightning speed using the same approach.”

A couple of weeks ago, Figma experienced its worst service disruption to date. This postmortem by their engineering leaders is a very transparent look at what happened and the steps they are taking to prevent it in the future: “The incident was caused by a bug in AWS's ElastiCache service with Cluster Mode enabled. The bug is such that high Publish / Subscribe workloads can trigger a sudden and sustained spike in Engine CPU utilization. Due to the complex nature of this bug, we did not hit it for weeks despite having moved our Publish / Subscribe workloads to a Clustered-Mode Enabled Redis instance much earlier.”

This deep dive into the making of the feature is my favorite kind of a blog post on Figma’s blog: “Building spring animations took our engineering team back to the classroom — to make animations that are both natural and accurate, we borrowed principles from physics. We’re excited to share the mechanics behind the movement, and the story of how spring animations bounced their way into Figma.”

Figma launched a partnership with Google for Education to bring Figma and FigJam directly to Chromebooks, the most popular personal computing device for students. This is a huge opportunity for students to learn the same app used by professional designers. (That said, I still warmly remember days of using keygens with Photoshop 4.)

Patrick Morgan writes about his way of structuring common design artifacts within Figma files. I find his approach of grouping them into Features, Libraries, and Presentations with a few sub-types quite interesting and useful.

Joey Banks on component properties: “In the past few weeks, I’ve had the chance to become more comfortable creating components that contain component properties. What has helped me the most has been to think of this new feature as an additional way, not a separate way, to further organize and create components and variants that scale with the library and system.”

A condensed summary of a Config talk by the Intuit Design System Team on creating a brand new Figma plugin to promote Intuit’s design system decisions and deliver them directly to their designers.

A solid collection of plugins to help you design, manage and operate design systems in Figma.

Good tips on how to avoid running out of memory in Figma. In short, it’s worth keeping an eye on hidden layers, complex components, and large assets in your Figma files.

An interview with Thierry Blancpain, co-founder of Grilli Type, one of the font foundries that were a part of Figma’s variable fonts beta.

If you’re feeling lost and unsure of where to start with Config’s 68 sessions, this article provides a good round-up of conference highlights.

Patrick Morgan created a useful library of Figma helpers and wrote about designing systems and tools for yourself to facilitate your own unique design workflow.

Molly Hellmuth discusses five major changes to the Auto Layout introduced at Config 2022.

The team at One North discusses ten of their favorite plugins.

Figma announced a prototype screen reader beta that includes support for text notes, alt text for images, and the ability to interact with and navigate through prototypes with buttons and keyboard actions like tabbing.

José Torre, Staff Product Designer at Shopify, gave a Config talk about getting the most out of design systems. The article he published earlier this year is a great summary of his thoughts on this topic.

Nathan Curtis wrote a really detailed 3-part series on building a workflow to assure the quality of design system assets.

Congrats to all ten winners! Highly recommend going through the list and checking out these fantastic resources.

Figma built a fantastic interactive page showing great possibilities provided by variable fonts and how to use them in Figma. It’s been a year since Toni Gemayel built the Variable Fonts plugin, and I’m happy it finally became a native feature.