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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.

A deep dive by one of Tinder’s software engineers into the process of building their design system. The team started by defining design tokens in Figma using the Tokens Studio plugin, then used the Style Dictionary framework to transform styling data from a single source of truth into platform-specific artifacts that can be consumed by their codebases. To support the future work of designers and engineers, they also created a comprehensive documentation site using Zeroheight.

Now it’s easier to track changes to components and styles. A new icon shows when styles or instances have changed, lets you accept changes for individual instances or layers, and even shows a before vs. after preview! See a quick demo by Jacob Miller.

“Beginning February 2023, Figma will add support for paid files, plugins, and widgets on the Figma Community. Eligible creators will be able to publish paid resources and users will be able purchase resources directly from the Figma Community.” As a community creator, I’m genuinely excited about this — I’ve had a few commercial plugin ideas in the past, but was put off by handling payments.

That said, the announcement raised some questions. All community files must switch to Figma’s payment platform, but existing plugins and widgets may continue to be sold through 3rd-party payment sites. Rogie provided additional details in his Twitter thread.

Joey Banks is back with a bit of advice on his new approach to using Auto Layout for building responsive components. ​“With my approach today, I first like to drag out an unfinished component instance and stretch it in bizarre and unexpected ways to see what happens. If I can make this component work as expected in the strangest sizes, I’ll feel confident that it’ll work for nearly all situations.”

Back in October, Linear launched a new home page that went down under a DDoS attack. In a genius move to save the day, they’ve redirected their domain to the Figma file with a home page design and hosted a live Q&A right there. In this post, Figma and Linear discuss how it happened and what they learned.

Chances are you’ve already seen Figma personas shared on Twitter or maybe even took the quiz yourself. It’s a set of 21 thought-provoking but fun questions that will tell you about your unique working style. Great end-of-year team activity to learn a bit more about yourself and your team!

Jan Six rebranded his popular Figma Tokens plugin to ​”Tokens Studio for Figma“. The plugin will stay as it is, the only thing that changes is its name. The team is also working on a dedicated design tokens manager that can be used with any tool. I don’t have any insight into this, but pretty sure the plugin was renamed so it won’t clash with the upcoming native tokens 👀

I write about this survey every year, and it’s always full of interesting insights into our industry. Figma is still the most used UI tool, but interestingly Adobe XD took second place from Sketch. Besides Figma, ProtoPie and Framer are the tools people are the most excited to try in 2023.

An interview with Jordan Singer from Diagram, who built Magician and participated in the text review API beta, exploring what this API enables and sharing tips on navigating the ​“untapped intersection of product design and AI.”

I shared Magician before, but in Jordan’s own words it’s ​“a design tool for Figma made by Diagram that introduces AI into designer workflows to expand your creativity and imagination as you design. It’s a magical utility that works alongside you to help ideate and inspire you with new ideas, whether it’s generating never-before-seen icons, imagery to use in your designs, or help with writer’s block.”

“Customers can collaborate confidently with agencies and companies, knowing that the right company can own the work. Customers on Professional, Organization, and Enterprise plans can now transfer teams and projects from one company to another in a few clicks, and customers on Organization and Enterprise plans can receive transfers.”

Matt Bailey attended Schema 2022 conference in London and shared his impressions. All of the talks are already available on YouTube, so check out Matt’s summaries to see if something piques your interest.