Articles

A conversation with Jennifer Daniel, a creative director at Google and chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee of the Unicode Consortium, about the effect emoji had on our communication and the process for selecting new emojis.

Wonderful post by Clara Ujiie on her journey from Figma user and client to Designer Advocate.

“I’m thrilled to announce that Storybook Connect for Figma is now in beta. It’s a Figma plugin which brings your stories into the design workspace. That streamlines design handoff and UI review because teams can reference code components alongside their designs.”

Interesting way to organize a large Figma workspace using a department store floor map as a mental model.

Joey Banks shares how he typically names Variants in Figma and the approach he tries to take whenever he is feeling stuck.

What a great idea to let community members nominate their favorite resources. Looking forward to see the winners on May 11th at Config!

Dylan Field shared three steps that Figma takes to become a more global company. First, Figma incorporated in Japan, set up an office in Tokyo, and started working on localizing Figma into Japanese. Second, they’re expanding in EMEA by opening offices in Paris and Berlin. And last but not least, Figma finally added support for RTL languages! Great news for designers working with Arabic, Hebrew, and Urdu who relied on 3rd-party plugins in the past. See thread by Lauren Budorick on why implementing RTL support was a huge undertaking.

FigJam is now available on iPad! Beta testing was announced back in January, and I’m really glad they started with FigJam. While I can’t see myself using the iPad for high-fidelity work, it’s perfect for making low-fidelity sketches with Apple Pencil or laying out flows. See the Twitter thread by Robert Bye, Product Manager of Mobile and Desktop Apps at Figma, on making some of these decisions while building the app.

Anton Kuznetsov shares two workarounds for creating negative spacing with Auto Layout. The easy way is to use Space Between, but there are some limitations, so Anton offers using a frame as a wrapper.

Joey Banks talks about his approach to organizing and naming in Figma.

”Product Manager Emily Lin shares the process of bringing FigJam to life, from beta to GA.“

In this tutorial, one of the designers from Noun Project gives a few quick tips on using Figma’s ​“Smart Animate” tool to animate icons in your UI.

Jan Six, creator of the powerful Figma Tokens plugin, joined forces with Marc Andrew, creator of a massive Cabana design system, to rebuild the system using tokens. It’s still an early version, but Jan talks about some of the benefits of the new approach in this article.

Anton Kuznetsov wrote a detailed guide to creating components with customizable content, better known as ​“slot components”. This approach is the best way to reduce the number of detached instances in your project.

“Dwell has a well-established culture of company-wide brainstorming, a concept they call ​“swarming.” During a swarm, someone will post a topic that they want to discuss into a Slack channel, throw in a FigJam link, and invite anyone from the company that is interested to join in and ​“swarm” on that subject. Swarms last around 10 to 15 minutes and can range from discussing a magazine feature idea to hammering out the details of company goals and editorial strategy.”

Amanda Kleha, CCO at Figma: ​“We want Figma to be a place where everyone can participate in the design process together—from brainstorm to build—while also making it easy to stay organized and flow from one task to the next. That’s why we’re excited to launch new FigJam plans, as well as a new Figma Enterprise plan, to welcome more people into the design process.”

A collection of tips to help improve your design workflow in Figma.

New Storybook plugin for Figma that lets you connect variants to stories.

A really detailed guide by Molly Hellmuth on spacing and layout grid best practices based on Material Design, Bootstrap, and Figma.

The design team at Medium shares a few of their favorite Figma tips.