Articles

Practical ways to overcome seven common Figma design issues caused by Auto Layout, constraints, groups, frames, components, and duplicates.

Danny Sapio shares a few best practices on using Figma for max efficiency: make components, use Auto Layout and don’t use groups, apply consistent spacing and styles, keep files organized and archive old designs, learn shortcuts, leverage community files, and present your work smoothly and cleanly.

Christine Vallaure highlights some of Figma’s features and possibilities to help you build a design that aligns with code as much as needed and improve your teamwork.

Molly Hellmuth gives a few practical recommendations on creating a bulletproof color system.

At Microsoft, Figma is winning over Adobe XD as their design tool of choice. Jordan Novet wrote an interesting profile for CNBC showing how several acquisitions and internal demand led to its rise in popularity, even while Microsoft and Adobe have worked together for over 20 years.

“Cloud 100 leaders from Algolia, Figma, Gong​.io, and Papaya Global share their stories from the trenches as they offer both strategic and tactical advice to founders on building enduring businesses.”

Learn everything you need to know to master the latest version of Auto Layout and optimize your work.

Elizabeth Alli shares how to embed an interactive Figma prototype into Notion.

I’m not familiar with the Specify app, but this use case is something I’ve been thinking of automating myself. Happy to see that there is an existing solution! As Sun Tzu once said, ​“If you wait by the river long enough, the Figma tools and plugins you need will float by.”

Forbes’ Cloud 100 is a list of the world’s top private cloud companies. Figma keeps climbing higher and higher in this rating — this year it’s #5 on the list, after being #7 last year and #29 in 2020.

Microsoft Design refreshed their entire library of Fluent Emojis last year, and now they’re open-sourcing them on Figma Community (see also parts 2 and 3) and GitHub. A staggering amount of work went into this set of 1,538 emojis and it’s definitely worth exploring. Every icon is available in multiple variants — 3D, flat, and high contrast. Beautiful work!

Figma opened up the prototype screen reader beta to everyone. The feature was announced earlier in May. ​“The beta includes screen reader support for text nodes, alt text for images, and the ability to interact with prototypes with buttons and keyboard actions like tabbing.” Here is a quick preview using a macOS VoiceOver.

As you may have noticed, I have a soft spot for color tools supporting perception-based color spaces. Taras Brizitsky writes about the plugin Generator that he built with Alex Bourt. It’s a really cool idea and implementation — start with a color, apply a set of visual modifications and conversions, and generate an entire palette from it. Change the starting color or modifiers to update all generated colors. Awesome!

Figma shipped a batch of lovely small improvements. See demo videos in their blog post, or read a full list with a few behind-the-scene links below.

Ryan Reid, UX Writer at Figma, created a guide and a community file to help other UX writers learn how to use Figma.

Figma is a natural place for the design team to get together, play, interact, and bond. Love this story about building a culture at Meesho Design: ​“While we brainstormed multiple ways and ideas to resolve this, we noticed that it was collaboration over Figma and struggles with Auto-Layouts that would create immediate bonds between us designers.”

Joey Banks is back with five advanced Figma tips — renaming layers in bulk, selecting all objects based on a specific property, Spacebar’s superpower, private components, and using descriptions to improve search.

Fantastic article by Shirley Miao about the complexities and hidden challenges of building Figma’s dark mode: ​“We wanted to build a solution that wouldn’t just solve the existing need for a new feature, but would be flexible enough to scale with us as the product evolved. Doing so would make it easier to onboard new engineers, tackle unforeseen challenges, and introduce new themes down the road. The trick was developing an approach that would be easy to implement and maintain, while also ensuring that it was regression proof.”

Nice overview of five high-quality UI kits.

An interesting application of smart Auto Layout hacks to create fully responsive chart components.