Articles

“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.

Q&A with Tekeste Kidanu, creator of the SPELLL plugin.

Q&A with Gavin McFarland, creator of the Table widget.

“We recently caught up with three of Figma’s engineers — Alice Ching, Joey Wang, and Greg Blaszczuk — to learn more about how they use FigJam to navigate their day-to-day. Here, they share how jamming helps them break down complex problems, work through feedback together, and add more fun to the workday.”

Nate Butler experimented with minimal generative series using Automator.

Jordan Singer on why he is building Automator, a general purpose tool to automate Figma. Its private beta was all the rage last week — see a few creative ways to use it below.

Beautiful effect! See also the source file at the Community.

A very solid list of recommendations, and not only for new designers.

Alex Dyakov explains how his team at Yandex.Maps uses Figma API and a separate development library to export assets and styles for all supported platforms, such as iOS, Android, and web.

Great article by Christine Vallaure on improving accessibility by using relative font sizes in CSS, and how to work around pixel-based sizes in Figma. While I always use a combination of rem and em units, I wasn’t familiar with the 62.5% CSS hack or that units can be switched during hand-off in Zeplin. Very cool!