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“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.

Now you can incorporate videos into Figma prototypes for richer, more realistic experiences. Videos can be viewed on any Figma plan, but only users on paid plans can upload new videos into files. See the playground file for more details.

The step-by-step guide on cleaning up a Figma file that was inherited from another designer. I like Edward’s focus on communicating with the team and automating repetitive work in the process.

At the recent All-Hands call Sho Kuwamoto confirmed that Figma is working on design tokens. Schema Conference seems to be a perfect moment to announce them, so fingers crossed!

“This year we’re taking Schema by Figma, our annual design systems conference, on the road to host three in-person events in New York, London, and Tokyo, as well as a virtual event for the location agnostic. With so much to look forward to, we wanted to get our community prepped and primed with a sneak peek of the themes and talks our team is especially excited to see.”

Kavir Kaycee explains why Figma won over the competition from the perspective of the Product Manager. He explains Figma’s success by being collaborative, community-driven, and affordable. I also like his point that Figma might become the starting point for all software development in the future.

Use ⌘-F or Ctrl‑F to trigger the search box. Fantastic update! This is a critical ​“must-have” feature, so I used to rely on Jackie Chui’s popular Find and Replace plugin. Fun fact: Jackie joined Figma and worked on the native feature as well. He’s even got a kind warning from Figma that his plugin is going to become obsolete soon. Love to see this kind of respect for the developers community from Figma.

Earlier this year, Jeremy Dizon led the project to enhance the Lyft Product Language (LPL) Native component library. In this blog post, he talks about the strategy they’ve used, the reason behind incorporating lightweight user research, and some key learnings from this 6‑month long project. Sometimes creating a new version of each component is the right approach, and major updates to Figma features provide a good opportunity for this work.

Andrew Hogan, Insights & Analysis at Figma: ​“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.”

Casey Newton interviews Dylan Field about antitrust issues, keeping control of his product road map, and whatever DALL‑E and other AI tools might mean for the future of design.

Congrats to the FigJam team! It’s definitely the most fun and delightful product I’ve used in a while.

A piece on why businesses should adopt a design-centric mindset to ensure success, with commentary by Nikolas Klein, Product Designer at Figma since 2018.