Articles

That’s a pretty neat idea: ​“We believe that developing a solid connection between icons and fonts is one way we can provide our products with a polished sense of beauty, a better user experience, and in some cases even, perhaps better functionality.”

Amelia Wattenberger wrote an insightful essay discussing a few reasons chatbots are not the future of interfaces and how adding controls, information, and affordances can make them more usable.

Interesting findings about the state of design, tech, and product development from the year-over-year change in Config submissions trends. This year the team received a whopping 1,000 talk proposals 🤯 The general mood of submissions was markedly optimistic compared with the previous 3 years. AI, accessibility, inclusion-related, and designer-developer collaboration topics are on the rise, while mentions of ​“pandemic” and remote work are declining.

Nice update to the Raycast extension for searching Figma files — now it works with multiple teams. See Ridd’s thread on how it speeds up his Figma workflow.

After adding screen readers support to Figma prototypes last year, now it’s introduced to FigJam. With this update, screen reader or keyboard users can move focus around the canvas, as well as between different menus and screens, to create, edit, and read out content. I love how these improvements make FigJam better for everyone: ​“Users can now navigate FigJam files using the Tab key to jump between objects on the canvas, as well as between text nodes for efficient editing. Hold Shift-Tab to tab in reverse.”

The accessibility team also shared a few tips on making FigJam files more accessible: provide ​“alt” text to images, use Sections to group content, numbered lists to describe order, and underscores to communicate fill-in-the-blanks.

Allie Paschal suggests a way of organizing a large design system library to avoid hitting a file memory limit in Figma. ​“Because Figma is cloud-based, each file (or tab) can only have 2GB max in both the browser and desktop application. But in general, keeping your file at a lower GB usage helps your overall file performance. I’ve found that Figma doesn’t like it when you start to near 60% of this 2GB capacity. So you really only have 1.2GB to work with before the evil file memory banners appear.”

A short introduction to design tokens: ​“Design tokens are modular, platform-agnostic building blocks of design systems that store repetitive design decisions. Design tokens act as a single source of truth and enable flexibility and scalability within the design system.”

You know I love color tooling! GitHub has been doing some excellent work on its color system, which is the foundation of the Primer design system. Last year they wrote about building internal color tooling for theme building, and in the new post, they share their process for making contrast changes in both default light and dark modes as part of GitHub’s larger accessibility strategy.

In addition to a bigger release, there are a bunch of good quality-of-life improvements: toggling between thin and thick markers with Command–B (lovely animation!), an addition of Paste to replace (Command–Shift–V) command to FigJam, and connecting two objects by simply clicking on one object followed by clicking on another.

In this guide, Bruno Temporim Carneiro shares a method for structuring Figma components through nesting and organizing variants. This approach allows for easy modification and updates to components.

Engineering Manager Alice Ching discusses how Figma draws inspiration from the gaming world in its development process. There are similarities between video game engines and Figma’s tech stack, with collaboration and creating delightful user experiences being the key aspects.

Joe Bernstein on confronting the conflict between what’s possible in Figma and what’s practical: ​“Ultimately, my point here is that I over-engineered this component. Figma has the capacity to be much more than a design tool, and sometimes I use it to engineer a UI. Clearly I enjoy doing that, and I even get lost in the weeds to achieve a deeply technical solution. But design systems and asset libraries are just as much a user-centered design problem as any other publicly facing product.”

Sepeda Rafael breaks down some aspects of the organization of the icon library and shares techniques that help avoid problems with the future support of the library as a part of the design system.

Jenny Wen, Product Design Manager at Figma, had a virtual AMA with the Designer Fund community, where she answered questions about leadership, the value of a ​“riffing” culture, designing for moments of delight, and where she goes for product design inspiration, news, and updates.

A solid round-up of recommendations from Pedro Morais on organizing Figma mockups and communicating important details to your team.

“In this three-part series, we’re talking to leaders and managers from teams at Shopify, Ironclad, Twitch, Uber, and more to learn about how they’re rethinking the way they work to keep pace with the outsized change in work right now.”

“In 2020, Figma’s infrastructure hit some growing pains. With database traffic growing ~3x annually, Engineer Tim Liang and the databases team set out to reduce potential instability and pave the way for scale.”

The team at Anima asks a controversial question, and makes a strong case for Storybook being the single source of truth: ​“Even though products begin with the components in the design, the end-users of those products will actually experience the components from the code. The single source of truth, then, is what users will actually see in the end.”

I mentioned the FigGPT plugin in the last issue, and now Edward Chechique wrote a detailed walkthrough of using this plugin. It requires an OpenAI API key but then provides direct access to ChatGPT prompts and tools for UX writing directly from the Figma document.

Danny Sapio with a few tips on working with paths, anchors, and fills to speed up your drawing workflow in Figma. This article is also available in a video format on YouTube.