Articles

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.

“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.”