Articles

Patrick Morgan with shares simple guidelines for using Figma to showcase your strength as a visual storyteller.

“As I spend this Valentine’s Day working in Figma, putting the final touches on my Founders Who UX program, with hearts in my eyes (and a stomach ache), I began romantically reminiscing about all the tools that helped get me here. What better way to express my gratitude to them on this day than a love letter?”

An insightful essay from Mills Baker, the Head of Design at Substack, about gloomy possibilities for software designers in the coming years. ​“Who was the architect of your apartment building or house? You probably have no idea. As the construction industry matured, and best practices were commodified, the percentage of buildings requiring the direct involvement of architects plummeted. Builders can now choose from an array of standard layouts that cover most of their needs; materials and design questions, too, have been standardized, and reflect economies of scale more than local or unique contextual realities. Buildings are, it’s true, perhaps a little worse than they used to be, but the trade-offs overall are clearly what people want.”

Figma launched network access restrictions on the Enterprise plan to enhance security measures. This feature allows organization admins to prevent employees from accidentally authenticating into personal Figma accounts while on the corporate network.

Jordan Singer and the Diagram team share the preview of Genius, their new tool for generating user interfaces with AI. ​“It understands what you’re designing and makes suggestions that autocomplete your design using components from your design system. It’s important to explore lots of ideas and iterate in the design process, and Genius ideates and iterates alongside you as you design.”

Thalion played with Figma to Webflow plugin and came up with the video tutorial and a summary of what you can do with it.

“Rolling out over the next few weeks in Japan, Europe, UK, and Canada, you have the option to purchase a new self-serve Organization plan on your own in the local currency or USD. At this time, invoicing is still only available in USD on the Organization and Enterprise plans.”

On the Enterprise plan, Figma introduced external content controls so companies can keep everyone’s work inside their Figma organization and protect their ideas. When access to external content is disabled, domain users can’t collaborate in files, projects, or teams outside of their Figma organization.

Design technologist Ravi Lingineni explains how Pinterest’s design system team measures adoption using Figma’s REST API. They’ve built a custom tool FigStats to calculate and monitor a new metric called design adoption, which measures how their design system Gestalt was being used across the board in Figma files.

Remember the gooey blobs in the previous issue? Well, Double Glitch took it to the next level with this Lava lamp demo. Beautiful effect and a very creative technique! See also this liquid swipe transition using the same approach.

The team at Figma talked to several industry experts from Google’s Material Design team, Spotify, Shopify, and Stripe about how they’re managing the future of design systems — from tooling to automation to accessibility. 

Sean Whitney, Craft Ventures investor and early Figma team member, sat down with Toni Gemayel, Figma’s first growth marketer, to talk about how he scaled growth marketing at Figma. While at Figma, Toni launched their Design Systems website, built an experimental Variable Fonts plugin before the native support was shipped, and was heavily involved with the design community.

Luis Ouriach wrote a massive multi-part guide on structuring teams, organizing projects, and managing files in Figma.

A blog post from Sketch co-founders outlining their strategy for 2023 and beyond. After layoffs in October, they’ve refocused as a company and doubled down on their two-apps approach: ​“You shouldn’t have to learn how to use design tools to give feedback on designs, test a prototype, or inspect files for handoff. Meanwhile, designers should get an editing experience that speaks to their needs and workflows, without any distractions.”

They’ve also redesigned their website (looks fantastic!) and are launching the community forum on February 23rd. The primary focus is on polishing the apps and talking to users. One of the new Sketch features is support for opening .fig files — the tables have turned indeed.

The new integration lets you embed a Mixpanel preview in FigJam to bring data into your whiteboarding sessions. File previews are automatically synced with Mixpanel so the latest data changes in Mixpanel will be reflected in FigJam.

Okay, my mind is blown. ​“Developing plugins for Figma using ChatGPT can be a powerful tool for automating low-level tasks and generating specific parts of code. However, it’s important to have a clear understanding of your goals and the steps necessary to achieve them in order to use ChatGPT effectively.”

Jackie Zhang writes about approaches to enhance team communication through logically structuring Figma files, labeling and annotating your designs, and hooking up all your files in a single FigJam flow. I particularly like the last recommendation and going to try it on the next project.

The team at Deliveroo built a library of ​“file management goodies” to bring more context to their designs and help people across the business navigate design files more efficiently. Section banners, flow and screen details, highlights, notes, and linked resources helped their team annotate their thinking within Figma.

A guide to using Tokens Studio to create flexible component libraries: ​“In headless design systems, the visual representation of components decouples from the logic required for their creation. Your building blocks gain UI after you apply tokens to them.”

I believe eventually starting work on top of a standard headless library will be normalized, similar to standard libraries in programming languages. How many times do we have to recreate all states of a button or create modals from scratch?

I’ve been enjoying Molly Hellmuth’s Friday Five newsletter with Figma tips and tricks. In the most recent issue, she shared a few clips from her Design System Bootcamp – like this tip on organizing file structure or another one on component properties.