Articles

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.

New article and Figma resources from Spotify Design: ​“If we only design for speedy devices, we also risk finding out late in the development process that our feature performs poorly on devices used in emerging markets — and at this point, it can be costly and painful to make significant changes. When designing for a global audience, we have to do better, which is why we developed Performance Context Cards and Performance Action Cards: tools for our teams (and yours) to use during certain stages of the product design process.”

A new product by Jordan Singer and Diagram, who you might remember from Automator and Prototyper. Magician is a Figma plugin that lets you design with the power of AI to do everything from copywriting to generating unique icons from the text. Currently in beta with three available ​“magic spells” for creating icons, writing copy, and generating images.

After following Vijay’s work for a few years, I enjoyed reading this interview and learning about the man behind the art. He speaks about his background, using Figma for realistic illustrations, and his creative process.

In Issue 89, I shared slides for Yuhki Yamashita’s talk ​“Confessions of modern design” on how design is changing, and how we need to change with it. This article summarizes his advice on navigating our new always-in-progress world and Figma’s approach to developing collaboration features designed with that in mind.

Loved this article by Paul Stamatiou on elevating product quality. His thoughts on the constant tension of shipping faster vs. shipping better and a promise of iterating are something I’ve been pondering a lot. Paul’s website itself is an inspiring example of a truly personal ​“homepage” with carefully crafted essays and resources.

Figma’s accessibility team shares what they’ve learned from the community and their vision for what’s ahead.

Figma Product Manager Jacob Miller’s keynote at Schema Conference on navigating the increasing complexity of design systems and what we can learn from the world of code.

Nilay Patel from The Verge interviews Dylan Field for the Decoder podcast. It’s the longest and sharpest interview since the acquisition — an absolute must-read. ​“So I wanted to talk to Dylan about the deal, why he’s doing it, how he made the decision to sell, and what things he can do as part of Adobe that he couldn’t do as an independent company. Dylan’s also a pretty expansive thinker, so after we talked about his company getting the ​“fuck you” money from Adobe, we talked about making VR Figma for the metaverse and AGI, which is artificial general intelligence, or the kind of AI that can fully think for itself.”

I found this discussion quite interesting and illustrative. Personally, I always use Auto Layout while working on semi-final designs, but it often gets in the way in the early stages and I resort to good old groups and frames. On a similar note, check out answers to Ridd’s impossible question on choosing between Auto Layout and components.