Articles

“There is a cohort of world-renowned graphic designers whose work people know whether they’re into design or not, and Paula Scher’s name sits squarely on that list. With this in mind, we invited the Pentagram partner to share her ​“10 rules for play” noted down over a formidable and long-lasting career.”

In-person attendees of Config 2023 found a copy of a playful zine in their swag bags. Figma collaborated with It’s Nice That on The Playbook to showcase the benefits of spontaneous thinking and curiosity through design. Inside, there is a piece on ​“how to embrace (and enjoy) endless iteration” by Chief Product Officer Yuhki Yamashita, as well as an investigation into what it truly means to be a collaborative engineer by Chief Technology Officer Kris Rasmussen. If you prefer getting hands-on rather than sitting down with an essay, there are also a host of activities to tackle.

Intuit is the parent company for products such as Quickbooks, TurboTax, Mint, Mailchimp, and Credit Karma. Intuit Design System (IDS) is used as a foundational system that other multidimensional design systems are built on top of. Nate Baldwin wrote about creating a design token taxonomy for it: ​“Token names are how design tokens are referenced and identified by consumers. But at the core, a ​“name” is more of an ordered representation of a catalog system and API. This catalog system and API is also known as a token taxonomy. Building a clear taxonomy assisted us in appropriately and consistently classifying tokens, as well as providing a scalable and predictable naming convention for consumers.”

“For added security, organization admins on the Enterprise plan can set an idle session timeout to log out users as soon as 12 hours after they become inactive. By default, Figma automatically logs users out when they are inactive for 21 days.”

Starting July 6th, Figma Enterprise customers have the option to host key parts of their Figma and FigJam files in the EU. This feature is designed to give Figma customers in the EU greater flexibility to meet local compliance and data privacy requirements.

A deep dive into variables by Thalion.

Lilibeth Bustos Linares is a teacher at Memorisely and co-organizer of a wonderful morning hike with Zander Whitehurst a day before the Config. Thanks to jet lag I was able to get up at 5:30 am and join the group at 6:30 am. It was wonderful to walk the Historic Trail of San Francisco and chat with so many designers from around the world! 

Dan Mall is an expert in design systems and a fellow designer from Philadelphia. Dan organized a post-Config basketball game, hosted a special dinner, and even captained the winning team at the Figmatch design competition. His recap focuses on what makes in-person conferences really special.

Joey Banks’ recap of everything announced at Config. (I was lucky to meet Joey and share the scene with him at Config, and his deep knowledge of Figma and expertise in design systems are second to none. Highly recommend subscribing to his Baseline newsletter.)

“After a year of exponential growth and a successful beta, Figma and Google for Education are doubling down on the promise of bringing design and technology tooling on Chromebooks to K12 students across the US and Japan. […] Today, we are excited to take another step forward in this journey by opening up free Figma access to all K‑12 districts across the US.”

You might have noticed that some of the above links point to Shortcut, Figma’s new blog. ​“Explore insights and opinions from industry leaders, get tips and inspiration from creators using Figma to build great things, and go in-depth and behind-the-scenes with the Figma team.”

A refresh to the file browser, so you can spend less time searching, and more time creating. New shared projects and files tabs help you easily find files that others have shared with you. Search, Recents, and notifications now include content across your entire account.

Oh my, this one was long in the making! Font previews were first announced at Config 2020, but now they’re finally live along with other improvements to the font picker. See this feature tour from KC Oh.

Noah Levin, VP of Design, unveils Figma’s vision for AI and shares that Figma has acquired Diagram. (It’s fun to look back at all Jordan’s experiments I shared in this newsletter, starting from 2020.) ​“In short, AI can help us do more — across every part of the product development process — faster. It’s not a feature, but a core capability; more than a product, it’s a platform that can up-level our work to the plane of problem solving — arguably the core pursuit of our craft, and the reason many of us got into design and product building in the first place.”

Starting point for the new advanced prototyping in help articles.

A starting point in help articles about variables: ​“Variables in Figma store reusable values that can be applied to all kinds of design properties and prototyping actions. They help save time and effort when building designs, managing design systems, and creating complex prototyping flows.”

Speaking of help articles, in Figma Beta Features you can see that additional variable types (images and typography), properties (strokes, effects, opacity), and extended collections (Enterprise-only) are coming later this year.

“The Figma for VS Code extension lets you navigate and inspect design files, collaborate with designers, track changes, and speed up design implementation — all without leaving your development environment.”

If you’re ready to dive in, this help article is a good introduction to starting using Dev Mode.

Kris Rasmussen, CTO of Figma, answers a question of how a design tool can work better for developers by introducing Dev Mode, ​“a new workspace in Figma that’s designed to get developers what they need, when they need it, harnessing the tools they use every day.” Something I didn’t expect: ​“Today, we know that on our paid plans more developers visit Figma than designers.” With this in mind, it’s great to see new plans for developers: ​“Starting in 2024, you’ll have an option to purchase Dev Mode access only for $25 per seat per month on Organization, and $35 per seat per month on Enterprise.”

(If you’re curious about what developers think about Dev Mode, check out comments on Hacker News. While that community tends to be overly negative, it’s interesting to see what kind of problems Figma is addressing with this launch.)

A new feature page for the Dev Mode, a space in Figma for developers offering features that help translate designs into code faster. This is a great overview to learn about inspecting designs, exporting variables as design tokens, generating production-ready code snippets, integrating Figma into your development workflow, bringing design files into the VS Code, adding structure to the handoff process, and comparing changes. Dev Mode is currently in beta and free to use through 2023.