Articles

“Rolling out over the next few weeks in Japan, Europe, UK, and Canada, you have the option to purchase a new self-serve Organization plan on your own in the local currency or USD. At this time, invoicing is still only available in USD on the Organization and Enterprise plans.”

On the Enterprise plan, Figma introduced external content controls so companies can keep everyone’s work inside their Figma organization and protect their ideas. When access to external content is disabled, domain users can’t collaborate in files, projects, or teams outside of their Figma organization.

Design technologist Ravi Lingineni explains how Pinterest’s design system team measures adoption using Figma’s REST API. They’ve built a custom tool FigStats to calculate and monitor a new metric called design adoption, which measures how their design system Gestalt was being used across the board in Figma files.

Remember the gooey blobs in the previous issue? Well, Double Glitch took it to the next level with this Lava lamp demo. Beautiful effect and a very creative technique! See also this liquid swipe transition using the same approach.

The team at Figma talked to several industry experts from Google’s Material Design team, Spotify, Shopify, and Stripe about how they’re managing the future of design systems — from tooling to automation to accessibility. 

Sean Whitney, Craft Ventures investor and early Figma team member, sat down with Toni Gemayel, Figma’s first growth marketer, to talk about how he scaled growth marketing at Figma. While at Figma, Toni launched their Design Systems website, built an experimental Variable Fonts plugin before the native support was shipped, and was heavily involved with the design community.

Luis Ouriach wrote a massive multi-part guide on structuring teams, organizing projects, and managing files in Figma.

A blog post from Sketch co-founders outlining their strategy for 2023 and beyond. After layoffs in October, they’ve refocused as a company and doubled down on their two-apps approach: ​“You shouldn’t have to learn how to use design tools to give feedback on designs, test a prototype, or inspect files for handoff. Meanwhile, designers should get an editing experience that speaks to their needs and workflows, without any distractions.”

They’ve also redesigned their website (looks fantastic!) and are launching the community forum on February 23rd. The primary focus is on polishing the apps and talking to users. One of the new Sketch features is support for opening .fig files — the tables have turned indeed.

The new integration lets you embed a Mixpanel preview in FigJam to bring data into your whiteboarding sessions. File previews are automatically synced with Mixpanel so the latest data changes in Mixpanel will be reflected in FigJam.

Okay, my mind is blown. ​“Developing plugins for Figma using ChatGPT can be a powerful tool for automating low-level tasks and generating specific parts of code. However, it’s important to have a clear understanding of your goals and the steps necessary to achieve them in order to use ChatGPT effectively.”

Jackie Zhang writes about approaches to enhance team communication through logically structuring Figma files, labeling and annotating your designs, and hooking up all your files in a single FigJam flow. I particularly like the last recommendation and going to try it on the next project.

The team at Deliveroo built a library of ​“file management goodies” to bring more context to their designs and help people across the business navigate design files more efficiently. Section banners, flow and screen details, highlights, notes, and linked resources helped their team annotate their thinking within Figma.

A guide to using Tokens Studio to create flexible component libraries: ​“In headless design systems, the visual representation of components decouples from the logic required for their creation. Your building blocks gain UI after you apply tokens to them.”

I believe eventually starting work on top of a standard headless library will be normalized, similar to standard libraries in programming languages. How many times do we have to recreate all states of a button or create modals from scratch?

I’ve been enjoying Molly Hellmuth’s Friday Five newsletter with Figma tips and tricks. In the most recent issue, she shared a few clips from her Design System Bootcamp – like this tip on organizing file structure or another one on component properties.

A deep dive by one of Tinder’s software engineers into the process of building their design system. The team started by defining design tokens in Figma using the Tokens Studio plugin, then used the Style Dictionary framework to transform styling data from a single source of truth into platform-specific artifacts that can be consumed by their codebases. To support the future work of designers and engineers, they also created a comprehensive documentation site using Zeroheight.

Now it’s easier to track changes to components and styles. A new icon shows when styles or instances have changed, lets you accept changes for individual instances or layers, and even shows a before vs. after preview! See a quick demo by Jacob Miller.

“Beginning February 2023, Figma will add support for paid files, plugins, and widgets on the Figma Community. Eligible creators will be able to publish paid resources and users will be able purchase resources directly from the Figma Community.” As a community creator, I’m genuinely excited about this — I’ve had a few commercial plugin ideas in the past, but was put off by handling payments.

That said, the announcement raised some questions. All community files must switch to Figma’s payment platform, but existing plugins and widgets may continue to be sold through 3rd-party payment sites. Rogie provided additional details in his Twitter thread.

Joey Banks is back with a bit of advice on his new approach to using Auto Layout for building responsive components. ​“With my approach today, I first like to drag out an unfinished component instance and stretch it in bizarre and unexpected ways to see what happens. If I can make this component work as expected in the strangest sizes, I’ll feel confident that it’ll work for nearly all situations.”

Back in October, Linear launched a new home page that went down under a DDoS attack. In a genius move to save the day, they’ve redirected their domain to the Figma file with a home page design and hosted a live Q&A right there. In this post, Figma and Linear discuss how it happened and what they learned.

Chances are you’ve already seen Figma personas shared on Twitter or maybe even took the quiz yourself. It’s a set of 21 thought-provoking but fun questions that will tell you about your unique working style. Great end-of-year team activity to learn a bit more about yourself and your team!