Articles

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.

Lee Munroe shows how the design team at OneSignal structures their meetings, including Figma design crits and fun activities in FigJam.

The team at Awwwards explains how Tilda differs from other website builders and why it’s the best tool for web designers who work on Figma and want to create professional websites without writing code.

Designer Advocate Ana Boyer ran a 15-day prototyping challenge to help the Figma Community learn how to take advantage of the new features and level up their prototyping game. In this post, she is sharing a recap of all tips, along with Figma Community files to get you started.

“Like always, the Figma Community impressed us with not only what but how they build in Figma and FigJam. Here, we’re sharing the trends, insights, and surprises we’ve observed about working together, apart.”

Fast Company: ​“When COVID-19 struck, Figma users needed a brainstorming tool, fast. FigJam aims to make collaboration more natural — and it’s just getting started.” (Use a private browsing mode to avoid a paywall.)

“In this last month of 2021, we introduced more ways to make collaboration and creation a breeze, so that nothing gets in the way of your productivity.” A few FigJam updates, a new mobile app for Figma, and partially rolled out new comments.

“Organizing your Figma files can be a daunting task, especially as your design system team and wider org grows. We’ve gathered some of the tips that we’ve picked up along the way, including ways you can make Figma work better with zeroheight.”

One of the best profiles of the early days of Figma and Dylan Field’s transformation from intern to CEO.

“AWS Amplify announces AWS Amplify Studio, a visual development environment that offers frontend developers new features to accelerate UI development with minimal coding, while integrating Amplify’s powerful backend configuration and management capabilities. Amplify Studio automatically translates designs made in Figma to human-readable React UI component code.”