Articles

“Rolling out to all Enterprise accounts over the next week, org admins can now sort users by cost center into a new container called billing groups. This allows them to track costs while using workspaces for content organization and collaboration. As part of this roll out, license management will transition from workspace admins to billing group admins. Workspace admins will no longer upgrade and downgrade users in their workspace or participate in true up.”

Sho Kuwamoto on variables and simplicity: ​“The obvious way to make things simpler is to remove things. Or maybe hide things. But one of the surprising aspects of simplicity is that sometimes, in order to make things feel more simple, you have to add more stuff.”

Jacob Miller, a Product Manager on the Design Systems team, unpacks the new features and answers questions about variables: ​“Our latest updates to variables in Figma allow for even more flexibility with updates to stroke weight, effects, layout grid, and layer opacity, along with nested instance variant binding. These upgrades not only boost design customization, they help align design and code like never before. Here, we share an overview of what we’re shipping with variables, how to use them in your current workflow, and where we’re going next with typography.”

Not mentioned in the article, but my favorite update is that now the variables authoring window can be resized! See also this thread by Luis, and Hugo’s accurate summary of the community’s reaction.

Congrats to Jordan Singer on making it to the Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list: ​“Product designer-turned-entrepreneur Jorgan Singer founded Diagram, a startup that created web-based design tools dubbed ​“Magician” and ​“Genius” that used AI and text-based prompts to generate design ideas and suggest design recommendations. Diagram quickly gained steam among its 100,000 users before being acquired by $20 billion design company Figma in 2023.” For more of his story, listen to the ​“Building Design Tools” episode of the Design is for Everyone Podcast and a long list of ideas that he has built since 2015.

UK is following in EU’s footsteps: ​“CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) provisionally finds Adobe’s deal to buy Figma would likely harm innovation for software used by the vast majority of UK digital designers.”

Not sure if the CMA truly understands what each of the apps is for: ​“The inquiry group has also provisionally found that Figma is a credible future competitor to Adobe in image editing and illustration software – and that the threat posed by Figma has driven product development in Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator applications, including new web versions. The inquiry group considers that if the deal went ahead, it would eliminate Figma as a competitor which would otherwise have continued to seek to develop its capabilities in image editing and illustration, thereby fuelling innovation and product development by Adobe.”

November 17th, 2023: ​“The European Commission has informed Adobe of its preliminary view that its proposed acquisition of Figma may reduce competition in the global markets for the supply of interactive product design software and of other creative design software.”

The Dev Mode team shares their early pivot away from a codegen-first approach, the acquisition of Visly that accelerated their efforts, and what it means to break down the handoff wall.

Financial Times: ​“Adobe’s $20bn deal to buy Figma is facing a fresh setback as regulators in Brussels prepare to file anti-competitive charges against the companies, an escalation that signals the EU believes the acquisition will harm rivals in the digital design market. […] A preliminary assessment of the deal already revealed a ​“substantial lessening of competition” in the UK. In the US, the Department of Justice is reportedly preparing a lawsuit to block the transaction. Adobe has already indicated it is ready to deal with probes as regulators intensify their scrutiny of large tech transactions.”

Evil Martians, the team behind the Polychrom plugin, shares lessons they learned while building it and how they incorporated traditional elements of computer science into their work, like algorithms, data structures, and tree traversal techniques.

An insightful look into cleaning up and shipping a new version of a large design system. The team struggled with slow performance, unused properties, lack of official nomenclature of properties, and ​“ghost components” without sources. It took the design system team three full months to address these problems, but they’re in a much better place.

Figma published a report from the survey of 470 design professionals in Europe and APAC exploring whether changes in working patterns, collaboration, and relationships with other departments have left designers in a good place in 2023. ​“A key finding of this report is the rising importance of collaborative product design. Despite the challenges of remote work, a new era of product design is emerging, one that thrives on collaboration.” See also a shorter recap of the study at It’s Nice That.

Vice President of Product, Sho Kuwamoto, explains why quality-of-life improvements are at the core of Figma: ​“I don’t want to be at a company that only invests in things that will make headlines. I want to make a product that I feel proud of. The truth is, people do resonate with little changes, and we know that because we pay attention to our users’ individual stories. Plus, when you celebrate the small things and give each one their moment, it gives people a chance to recognize how important each one is.”

Pretty incredible in this economy: ​“Design startup Figma Inc.’s headcount has grown roughly 60% since it announced merger plans with Adobe Inc. in September 2022, a sign the company hasn’t been standing still while it waits for the deal to close.” On the acquisition: ​“The Adobe acquisition is scheduled to be completed by the end of March, though it may be hard to conclude the purchase in that time frame with at least one of the regulatory agencies likely to challenge the deal, Bloomberg Intelligence antitrust analyst Jennifer Rie wrote in September. Adobe may owe the design startup a $1 billion breakup fee if the transaction takes longer than that and the deal collapses, according to the merger documents.” (See the archive link.)

A solid roundup of the design systems resources from one of the most respected conferences.

A new series from Patrick Morgan focused on UI design execution and strategy. The first video is a step-by-step walkthrough reverse-engineering YouTube’s video grid UI, with the Figma community file of the output of the work session.

Peter Yang interviewed Yuhki Yamashita about building FigJam AI, creating a culture where PMs and designers love their craft, making design accessible to everyone, and balancing new and power user needs. Most of Yuhki’s advice in this interview is for PMs, but it still applies to any product designer. (The interview is paywalled, but there is a lot of good stuff in the preview.)

Love this story about FigJam’s early days: ​“We had a meeting with our board two months before we were going to launch FigJam. The board asked us what our differentiator was since there were many other whiteboard tools. And Dylan said, ​“Well, it’s fun!” But then we realized that the product wasn’t fun enough. So the FigJam team ran a sprint called ​“FunJam” to come up with all the playful features that you see today like cursor chat, emotes, and more. So you’re absolutely right – fun was a core principle. Most workplace tools are a little boring and confine you in a box. We want to give you an inviting canvas with many lightweight ways to express yourself.”

The AI is now integrated into FigJam to ​“help you instantly visualize ideas and plans, suggest best practices, and, of course, automate tedious tasks, so you can focus on the bigger picture.” What started as an experimental widget Jambot is now a first-class part of the product using GPT‑4. I used it this week to create a structure for a presentation which was a useful 0 to 0.1 progression. You can give it a try at the playground or check out how Zander Whitehurst uses it to create crazy flow charts.

Baseline grids are hard to implement and their value is debatable, but I still irrationally love them. This article outlines a smart approach to using Figma’s vertical trim and Auto Layout to create reusable blocks for a baseline grid.

The new page from Figma nicely explains different ways to build a color scheme (see also the book ​“Interaction of Color” by Josef Albers) but falls flat when it comes to color models and contrast — I wish this discussion didn’t stop at physics and involved human perception and modern tools. The generator also exists as a plugin, and that’s where it comes handy.

Harry McCracken published a big story about Figma and Dylan Field at Fast Company. It talks about Adobe’s acquisition and what it could mean for both companies, the future of design in the era of AI, the origin story of Figma, and their big ambition to ​“make creativity the new productivity”.