Articles

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.

Joey Banks shared a change in his approach to base components earlier this month on Twitter, and now goes into more details in his newsletter. I often end up with too much complexity because of over-reliance on base components, so this is a piece of welcome advice.

Great stories and reflections from Marcin Wichary on bugs in software. ​“At Figma, there are many processes and tools to deal with bugs, including recurring Quality Weeks: time dedicated to coming together within a product team, and to fixing bugs that might otherwise get forgotten by time, bugs that deserve extra investigation, and bugs that stretch the traditional definition of bugs.”

This reminded me of another great post, ​“Debugging Misadventures: Down the Rabbit Hole”, by ex-Figma engineer Jamie Wong that I shared a while ago.

Nice write-up on how Spotify updated their icon system and streamlined the contribution flow with Figma. Shaun Bent shares a few more details in his Twitter thread.

“Over the past two months, we’ve rolled out a number of updates to comments in Figma. As always, insights about our users and how they design together informed these improvements. The data science team spearheaded experiments to learn how to encourage feedback and collaboration directly in the file. Here, Data Scientist Emily Jia shares the hypotheses, tests, and learnings that lead to this cross-functional, data-driven product launch.”

In his new newsletter, Joey Banks answers one of the popular questions — what’s the difference between groups and frames in Figma, and when should you use one over the other?

“As we kick off the new year, we wanted to zoom out beyond the work. So, we reached out to design leaders Soleio, Julie Zhuo, and May-Li Khoe to share how they’re thinking about 2022, in the design community and beyond. In this Q&A, we’re sharing their personal reflections, predictions about creative work, and guidance for the year ahead.”

Insightful essay by Andy Matuschak on mediums which integrate doing with explanation, particularly Figma with its ​“workbook” files shipped with new features. ​“Not a board game manual next to the board game, but explanation inside the board game. Not a YouTube tutorial open next to Logic, but an explanatory medium inside Logic.”

Really cool project by Michael Feeney. He started by analyzing Mac OS 9 design and building a UI kit for it, then imagined how some popular modern apps would look back in the day.

“Figma has advanced enough where it now supports some powerful concepts that can help with the flexibility and maintainability of a design system. In this article, Sasha explains why she finds the Systems Designer position so rewarding — and it’s not only because of how fast certain tools have developed to help her master challenges she faces in her work projects.”

Jan Toman wrote a guide for using Figma branches to improve the reliability of UI components. His approach of always using branches for design system contributions and creating a set of visual regression tests is similar to the best practices in the development world and should really help with making a design system more robust.

Danny Sapio with a few quality tips for working with components.