Articles

Luis Ouriach: ​“If you’re working in a team with either multiple brands, multiple platforms, multiple densities, or perhaps all of the above you may be stuck trying to figure out how to structure your system/​s in Figma. Here are some loose thoughts on how I’d go about approaching the problem.”

Joey Banks explains how to use constraints to create responsive components that work with nearly endless screen widths and heights. One hidden feature he didn’t mention is a special relationship between constraints and layout grids — see my old article ​“Using Constraints with Layout Grids in Figma” from 2020.

“How do you design an app for 431 diverse national parks and monuments? By taking a page from iconic NPS park brochures. Learn how a small team adapted Massimo Vignelli’s seminal design system for a digital interface.”

“After months of iterative development, including a closed beta and continuous refinement using our eval plugin, we were ready for a broader launch. Looking back, shipping this work was guided by four key principles: 1) AI for existing workflows: We applied AI to streamline tasks that users already perform, like file browsing and copying frames into their current file. 2) Rapid iteration: We continuously shipped updates to our staging environment, using insights from our internal beta to refine features. 3) Systematic quality checks: We developed custom evaluation tools to monitor and improve search result accuracy. 4) Cross-disciplinary teamwork: Our success stemmed from close cooperation across product, content, engineering, and research.”

Claire Butler, a marketing lead at Figma, shares three principles that help market to designers or other groups of passionate experts. Make sure to watch the video she is referring to.

I furiously nodded while reading her second lesson: ​“If you can come up with and understand all of the content, you haven’t gone deep enough. Whatever you are doing will come across too generic, and thus will not resonate. They’ll sniff you out.”

Joey Banks with a deep dive on applying and organizing variables in Figma: “…if there’s one thing I’ve learned about variables, it’s that nearly every team takes a slightly different approach when it comes to creating and keeping them organized in Figma. I’d love to recap the many ways I use variables within the components and libraries I make, as well as some of the techniques and decision frameworks that have helped me most, and share with you how I approach creating and keeping them all organized, too.”

A great written interview with Katie Dill, Stripe’s Head of Design, about craft and quality, functionality and beauty in products, rituals to level up product quality, and keeping quality a priority as companies scale.

Mizko explains how to use Sections when prototyping in Figma: ​“When presenting your final output with Sections, Figma remembers the user’s last viewed frame. This ensures that when the user returns, it will show the previously viewed frame first. This creates a more comprehensible transition of your prototype.”

Smashing Magazine interviewed Björn Ottosson, the Swedish engineer who created Oklab color space, about developing an effective model with good hue uniformity that handles lightness and saturation well, and how it spread across the ecosystem.

One of the most common problems that Oklch solves: ​“One problem with sRGB is that in a gradient between blue and white, it becomes a bit purple in the middle of the transition. That’s because sRGB really isn’t created to mimic how the eye sees colors; rather, it is based on how CRT monitors work. That means it works with certain frequencies of red, green, and blue, and also the non-linear coding called gamma. It’s a miracle it works as well as it does, but it’s not connected to color perception.”

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.”