Articles

Co-founders of Sketch shared their stance on AI: ​“We’re not ready to make a move with AI just yet — for reasons that will become clear. However, we wanted to share the principles that will guide our approach when that time comes.”

I respect their position on using AI to aid designers but never to create designs. To me, Make Design was the least exciting AI feature announced at Config, and I’m glad it was reframed as the First Draft during the relaunch a few weeks ago. Their focus on privacy and being local-first is a smart way to differentiate from Figma and offer something unique, even if that required burying Sketch Cloud first.

Jenny Xie interviewed Marcin Wichary, Joel Miller, Ryhan Hassan, and KC Oh about the new Figma UI: ​“Our goal with UI3 is to keep designers in the flow by minimizing distractions and placing their work center stage. With that north star in mind, our team worked for over two years, iterating on myriad approaches — even reversing some core design decisions, like the floating navigation and properties panels, after launch.”

Archive link without a paywall. A large profile in The New York Times of what Jony Ive and his studio LoveFrom have been up to in the last five years. 

It’s a rare look behind the scenes at his interests and work, but this part caught me by surprise: ​“Mr. Ive and Mr. Altman met for dinner several more times before agreeing to build a product, with LoveFrom leading the design. They have raised money privately, with Mr. Ive and Emerson Collective, Ms. Powell Jobs’s company, contributing, and could raise up to $1 billion in start-up funding by the end of the year from tech investors. In February, Mr. Ive found office space for the company. They spent $60 million on a 32,000-square-foot building called the Little Fox Theater that backs up to the LoveFrom courtyard. He has hired about 10 employees, including Tang Tan, who oversaw iPhone product development, and Evans Hankey, who succeeded Mr. Ive in leading design at Apple.” 

The AI feature Make Designs is back under a new name, First Draft, which I greatly prefer as it sets more accurate expectations. (Curiously, that was the original internal project name.) ​“We’re also introducing some key updates, like letting you choose from one of four libraries depending on your needs — whether it’s a wireframing library to help you sketch out less opinionated, lo-fi primitives, or higher-fidelity libraries to provide more visual expressions or patterns to explore.”

I believe that wasn’t previously shared: ​“Our vision is for First Draft to extend beyond our current libraries and allow organizations to incorporate their own custom libraries. In the future, teams will be able to draft ideas using their company’s unique design language without having to sift through hundreds of components by hand.”

“Collaborative-design software maker Figma Inc. accused competitors of breaching a contract and copyright infringement by stealing its source code. Singapore-based Motiff Pte. Ltd., along with Chinese companies Yuanfudao HK Ltd. and Kanyun Holding Group Co., accessed Figma’s product under a subscription agreement and reverse engineered its copyrighted code for their own product in violation of Figma’s Master Subscription Agreement, according to a complaint filed Monday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.“

The court document includes a fascinating list of examples.

Maria Christopher from Uber, on the challenges of managing a growing design system: ​“Over time, we struggled with component redundancy and system inconsistency. The increasing complexity from the sheer amount of components, variants, and customizations began to undermine the effectiveness and integrity of our system. It turns out, we weren’t alone. This mirrors a broader trend in the design industry, where the focus is shifting towards critically evaluating and simplifying systems, rather than just adding more layers of complexity.”

Weeks after leaving Figma, Jordan Singer introduced Mainframe, ​“a future operating system with AI as the default”.

(Made me think of Playbit, started by Rasmus Andersson a few years ago. What’s up with ex-Figma designers starting operating systems?!)

Fast Company on Figma’s rebrand: ​”Today, the company is launching a refreshed visual identity that represents its growing, post-Adobe breakup ambitions to be, well, just about everything. Figma’s been making moves to expand beyond its founding idea of being being a single product company for designers, to a multi-product company for multi-role creative teams. Now, the company’s refreshed brand is catching up and speaking to an expanded audience that includes developers and supporting team members like project managers, who help bring a design deliverable to life.”

Olivia Hingley for It’s Nice That: ​“Sitting at the core of the concept is a new brand idea: ​‘build by design’. Short and sweet, the idea reinstates that design is more than just a skill, department or process, it’s the ​“gravitational centre” of the brand. Three brand beliefs come from this idea: ​‘design is everyone’s business’, which speaks to the flexibility and broad nature of design, while the second, ​‘craft as a differentiator’, centers on the care and attention to detail that Figma propagates. […] And, the third and final belief is ​‘the idea is just the beginning’.”

A deep dive into Figma’s brand refresh. ​“Figma’s visual identity has gotten a bold refresh. From playful primitives to a vibrant new palette, we’re unveiling our latest brand evolution — one that speaks to all product builders.” 

I love when Luis gets down to the nitty-gritty of the mundane daily challenges: ​“If my team needs to ship a feature that uses version 1, and your team needs to support version 2 because you’re releasing much further in the future, how do we manage that with a single component in a single library? As soon as we update the component to version 2 in our library and hit the publish button, every single designer is grandfathered into the newest version. This should be sending alarm bells to us all! We need the ability to maintain two separate versions of the same component, but unfortunately this isn’t possible within Figma yet. As a result, we need to think laterally to figure out a solution for all.”

He makes so many good points: ​“Centrally though, I believe we should strive for a world where design files are throwaway deliverables, versus an ongoing ​“forever file” that’s constantly updated.”

Nathan Curtis: ​“In 2015, I established three models of forming teams for scaling design systems: solitary, central, and federated. The article progressed through each, scoffing at solitary, considering central, and favoring federated based on the section’s positioning and proportional length. […] In this article, I’ll dig into how federated is not a choice, it’s a facet. In practice, it’s never pursued first and never without central investment. In most cases, it’s optional and its outcomes can be so expensive and frustrating that it’s not worth it. Even worse, positioning federated as a primary objective anchors so many stakeholder myths to unwind that it damages system potential and even threatens its existence.”

In the first article in the series on Figma’s brand evolution, editor Jenny Xie takes us behind the scenes of the new custom typeface, Figma Sans, designed by Swiss and American type foundry Grilli Type. Don’t miss the Figma Sans page on the foundry’s website.

What a fantastic post from Paul Stamatiou! His observations resonated with me after working on multiple products from the early days. ​“There’s nothing glamorous about being a designer at a startup. It’s a role that frequently values speed and pragmatism over going deep in the craft. It’s not all big launches, viral tweets, building for happy paths, and clear-cut product requirements. However, it can be incredibly rewarding. The fun comes from being able to excel at learning new skills and wearing many different hats while being solely responsible for large efforts.”

Andrei Rybin shows his tools and methods for interface animations. Rive is a very interesting product I’ve been meaning to try for a while!

At Config, Figma shared a roadmap to make Figma work better for freelancers and agencies. Last week, they launched the first step towards this commitment. Now, you can transfer work to your clients on Pro plans. In the process, you can keep a copy of the work for yourself, and clients can remove collaborators when accepting a transfer to avoid accidental upgrades.

A big update to the Tokens Studio plugin introduces W3C DTCG format support, new variables exporting experience, using variables inside styles, typography tokens, and more.

Designer Advocate Mallory Dean on how learning the three Cs can help you build up the basics and pick up steam: ​“One of the core responsibilities of my role as a designer advocate is to onboard teams to Figma and help them see the magic of ​“multiplayer,” as we call it. In doing so, I myself have learned from the experience and collected invaluable resources. Most importantly, I see how I would have changed my approach when I first started out. Instead of focusing on learning specific features, I would prioritize understanding different focus areas, which I call the three Cs of Figma: creation, customization, and collaboration.”

Nanda Syahrasyad explains how to export SVGs with individual paths from Figma to be animated with CSS. This article is a part of his Interactive SVG Animations course that will be launched this fall.

Christine Vallaure shares an updated list of her old favorites and plenty of new tips, highlighting what you might have missed when working with components in Figma. (Thanks for the friend link!)