Articles

“The Justice Department is preparing to open an in-depth investigation of Adobe’s $20 billion takeover of design collaboration company Figma, according to four people with knowledge of the matter and a document viewed by POLITICO.”

A beautiful deep dive into the making of a new background music feature in FigJam.

A solid collection of plugins for a more efficient workflow in Figma.

Collaborate on Figma and FigJam files directly in Microsoft Teams.

Never miss a beat in Figma or FigJam with notifications. Now available on iOS, Android, or desktop.

Give words more meaning on the fly with Markdown support.

Respond to questions and review work in Figma and FigJam from anywhere via comments on your phone or tablet. Download now for iOS or Android.

Speed up decision-making and remove bias by empowering teammates to vote anonymously on ideas and prompts.

Get on the same wavelength as your team by working to the beat together in FigJam. Don’t miss a fantastic easter egg shared by Anthony and Miggi — you can put the needle on the record to start the timer and music in FigJam.

Organize content with sections to help teammates navigate through busy Figma files. A section is a default top-level element on the canvas and its own layer type is used primarily for organizing files and grouping designs. Additionally, sections allow you to organize prototypes and preserve their state, as Miggi shows in one video and Anthony in another. See also Sho Kuwamoto’s notes on the controversy surrounding launching this feature.

“Over the last year, we’ve created a write-ahead log that makes our system more reliable than before. 95% of edits to a Figma file get saved within 600ms, which means that as the teams that use Figma scale, their work can scale with them. We wanted to share exactly how we got to that sort of reliability, but before we get started, we’ll need to provide some context on how exactly Figma’s multiplayer editing works.”

“We set out to understand why some companies seem to have no problem attracting design talent while others struggle to connect. So, we surveyed and interviewed hundreds of hiring managers and recruiters about their experiences. We wanted to know how they get started courting great talent, and what aspects of company culture are most vital to designer happiness.”

Unsurprisingly, strong design culture is one of the most important factors for designers looking for a new role.

One of the most interesting takes on the acquisition I’ve read so far. Wenting Zhang left Adobe over a year ago, but before that she spent 1.5 years working on Adobe XD and 5 years on Adobe Fonts (ex-Typekit). While as an ADBE investor she has a clear bias about the price, her observation about the org chart oddity is really interesting.

“Knowing how people use Figma is a critical process for making design accessible to everyone, and it requires us to carefully collect and analyze different types of user data. It’s a big responsibility to be entrusted with this data, so we want to be sure our customers know what we use it for and why.”

“On the Figma security team, our goal is to help Figmates ship new products and features as securely as possible — all without slowing them down. We wanted to share our operating model, which prioritizes transparency, decentralized and reusable solutions, and earning trust over mandating processes.”

Nick Burd walks readers through the process of creating basic design tokens in Figma and syncing them with a Github repository.

Sorry to hear the bad news and wish the best to the Sketch team: ​“In response to challenging market conditions and with a desire to keep our product-first strategy, we’ve taken the difficult decision to reduce our team by just over 80 people. This will mostly impact Operations and Marketing, who have done great work in the recent weeks and months. Our Product team remains well-equipped, with a core team continuing to drive things forward.”

Graeme Fulton looks into the difference between ​“open design” and ​“open-source design tools”, the new opportunity for an era of open-source design amidst Adobe ⨉ Figma, and how designers can be a driving force behind open-source itself. Sketch’s open file format is something we’ve always taken for granted.

Industry benchmarking report for an emerging field of DesignOps, delivering insights into the state of the practice, people, and tools (no surprises there — Figma is used by 92.3%​of teams) of design operations teams everywhere. If you’re interested in this field, don’t miss the ​“From Designer → DesignOps” essay from Cai Charniga, DesignOps at Figma.

Figma is partnering with Google on building ​“smart chips” into Google Docs. In the case of Figma and FigJam that will be a visual thumbnail of the project. Available to all users starting January 2023.