Articles

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.”

“One significant aspect that design systems solve is serving as a single source of truth across products so that we can save ourselves from this mess at handoff. But what is this single source of truth and how do the teams working on it build and manage it?”

Major update to the Figma mobile app. Now you can view, browse, and share files and prototypes without being tethered to the desktop app, mirror designs on mobile for selected frames on desktop, and enjoy an intuitive and performant UX on iOS and Android.

“Use link previews to add sources of inspiration and useful context to your FigJam file. Paste links of rich media from other websites — like videos, articles, or documents — and FigJam will turn them into a preview on your board. Figma will even make some link previews interactive, which allow you to pan around Figma design files and city maps, or stream music and videos while you work in FigJam.”

A few good tips on using Auto Layout by Danny Sapio.

“This month, we introduced capabilities that move you from task to task faster and make it easier to share and act on feedback, so you can take ideas from good to great.”

Last year, Figma destroyed the competition in almost every category. They went after a few remaining areas with the launch of FigJam this year. Great to see that Figma is still the most exciting design tool out there by far!

Josh Cusick shares how the Design Systems team at Microsoft built, maintained, and set up for people to contribute the Figma UI kit for Teams Component Libraries (TCL). He covers structuring pages, naming things, aligning with code, design tokens, and version control.

Good list of ten very different free icon packs.

A guide on how to build design systems that scale easily and sync with GitHub, with the help of a plugin called Figma Tokens.

The developer of the popular Mac app iStat Menus tested how various design tools utilize the hardware they’re running on. For Figma, GPU seems to be more important than CPU, while memory is not a big factor as usage is limited to 2GB per tab. Good to know if you’re getting a new Mac but not sure about the config.

Ryhan Hassan, Product Designer at Figma, on comments redesign: ​“To help teams manage and incorporate feedback throughout the design process, we’re introducing updates to comments in Figma and FigJam. These changes are designed to encourage collaborators to share comments and understand how to give better feedback, while helping designers more easily act on the input they receive.” Also, see his Twitter thread on design details and Christa Simon’s thread on design research.