Articles

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.

Matt Stoller: ​“My instinct is that this merger is illegal and that it will be blocked or abandoned. But I’m not 100% sure, as there are also technical issues here that I’m still trying to wrap my head around. But even within the merging parties, there is genuine concern about whether this merger will close. Internally, Adobe executives are already telling employees not to write anything down about the merger for fear it will be found by government investigators.”

The Wall Street Journal gathered thoughts and concerns on the deal from folks in the industry, including Scott Belsky, Fons Mans, and Yuhki Yamashita.

Index Ventures is Figma’s first and largest venture partner. In this post, Danny Rimer questions what makes Figma so special and talks about the generational significance of design thinking and Dylan’s focus on the community.

Joey Banks explains why new features are so important for the design systems’ work.