Articles

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.

Denislav Jeliazkov tested more than 500 plugins and collected a list of 102 that he keeps coming back to.

Edward Chechique shares some ideas for AI features that he hopes to see at Config 2023.

A beautifully presented shortlist of 11 out of 32 ​“little big updates”.

See also Molly Hellmuth’s top 10. Below is my personal shortlist, which is a little different.

I love reading about how design decisions are being made! This story shares a few anecdotes from the designers and engineers behind the current shipment of Little Big Updates, including multi-select search, background blur in prototypes, on-canvas previews, and hanging punctuation.

FTE is an open-source tool for creating an automatic communication channel between design decisions (represented as design tokens) and code. The main objective of the tool is to simplify the standardization and update of these decisions throughout all the digital products sharing a Design System. Its creator Daniel Casado shows how to install, configure, and use the FTE to transform design tokens (either as Figma styles or from Token Studio) into CSS styles.

Figma published their internal design team career levels and accompanying Skills Chart widget to the Figma Community! Last year they refreshed the leveling framework and Design Manager Sara Culver wrote a detailed post documenting this work. For additional context, I highly recommend Noah Levin’s thread on this project. Also, don’t miss their templates for performance reviews and calibration.

Ridd came up with a new tutorial on how to use Kernel for designing in Figma 10× faster with real data. Kernel is a new product that ​“makes it easy to generate and access the content you need so you can design faster than ever”, and connects Figma to other services like Notion, Airtable, Google Sheets, and OpenAI.

“As a people manager, you have the power to set the tone for your team and create the right conditions for success. Now more than ever, teams want to feel a sense of agency: to set their own goals, have fulfilling careers, and get work done without constant interruptions. We checked in with people managers at Uber, Twitch, Shopify, Oura Ring, and Work & Co. to find out how they’re helping their teams feel more fulfilled and move work forward.”

“Now you can create tables in FigJam right from the bottom tool bar. Organize information and ideas in custom-sized tables to build project plans, decision matrices, pro/​con lists, and more.” Check out a quick demo video and read the blog post on how the product team arrived at the approach, tackled multiplayer bugs, and finessed design details.

The new series at Figma blog, Meet the Maker, kicks off with Marcin Wichary, a design manager from the Editor team. I wrote about Marcin’s book Shift Happens in issue #102 — since then, it became the #1 tech book of all time on Kickstarter and reached its final stretch goal! This is a lovely interview touching on many topics close to my heart — exploring niche interests, making things, experimenting, prototyping, getting feedback, and obsessing over details.

Rogie King reflects on the launch of new selling tools and the Figma Creator Fund for the Figma Community, and why these additions are important for the next generation of the Figma Community. I’ve been thoroughly impressed with Figma’s openness to the community feedback while preparing this release, and Rogie’s advocacy for the needs of the design community.