Articles

Nathan Curtis: ​“In 2015, I established three models of forming teams for scaling design systems: solitary, central, and federated. The article progressed through each, scoffing at solitary, considering central, and favoring federated based on the section’s positioning and proportional length. […] In this article, I’ll dig into how federated is not a choice, it’s a facet. In practice, it’s never pursued first and never without central investment. In most cases, it’s optional and its outcomes can be so expensive and frustrating that it’s not worth it. Even worse, positioning federated as a primary objective anchors so many stakeholder myths to unwind that it damages system potential and even threatens its existence.”

In the first article in the series on Figma’s brand evolution, editor Jenny Xie takes us behind the scenes of the new custom typeface, Figma Sans, designed by Swiss and American type foundry Grilli Type. Don’t miss the Figma Sans page on the foundry’s website.

What a fantastic post from Paul Stamatiou! His observations resonated with me after working on multiple products from the early days. ​“There’s nothing glamorous about being a designer at a startup. It’s a role that frequently values speed and pragmatism over going deep in the craft. It’s not all big launches, viral tweets, building for happy paths, and clear-cut product requirements. However, it can be incredibly rewarding. The fun comes from being able to excel at learning new skills and wearing many different hats while being solely responsible for large efforts.”

Andrei Rybin shows his tools and methods for interface animations. Rive is a very interesting product I’ve been meaning to try for a while!

At Config, Figma shared a roadmap to make Figma work better for freelancers and agencies. Last week, they launched the first step towards this commitment. Now, you can transfer work to your clients on Pro plans. In the process, you can keep a copy of the work for yourself, and clients can remove collaborators when accepting a transfer to avoid accidental upgrades.

A big update to the Tokens Studio plugin introduces W3C DTCG format support, new variables exporting experience, using variables inside styles, typography tokens, and more.

Designer Advocate Mallory Dean on how learning the three Cs can help you build up the basics and pick up steam: ​“One of the core responsibilities of my role as a designer advocate is to onboard teams to Figma and help them see the magic of ​“multiplayer,” as we call it. In doing so, I myself have learned from the experience and collected invaluable resources. Most importantly, I see how I would have changed my approach when I first started out. Instead of focusing on learning specific features, I would prioritize understanding different focus areas, which I call the three Cs of Figma: creation, customization, and collaboration.”

Nanda Syahrasyad explains how to export SVGs with individual paths from Figma to be animated with CSS. This article is a part of his Interactive SVG Animations course that will be launched this fall.

Christine Vallaure shares an updated list of her old favorites and plenty of new tips, highlighting what you might have missed when working with components in Figma. (Thanks for the friend link!)

“Spectrum, Adobe’s design system, already had a robust icon system, but the time had come for a redesign. Evolving a design system’s icons can involve updating and/​or redesigning assets, improving how icons are maintained and served to the teams using them, and creating a solution for adding, updating, and deprecating design elements within it. Months of discovery, exploration, reviews, and sharing laid the groundwork for the icon team’s three-phase process. It began with extensive design exploration and beta testing to confirm the needs of product teams, and ended with implementing suggestions for improving search, customization, and serving icons. It’s a method of inquiry, feedback, and refinement that other teams can apply to their work.”

Kate Moran from Nielsen Norman Group demonstrates how to get better results from generative AI chatbots by writing ​“CAREful” prompts. Use the acronym CARE (context, ask, rules, and examples) to remember what information to give AI tools to achieve your desired results: include context, what you’re asking the system to do, rules for how to do it, and examples of what you want.

Ridd on two big issues and two opportunities of designing with AI: ​“If I’m in my design tool it’s because something is in my brain (even if it’s just a simple sketch). That’s why I don’t buy the so-called ​“blank canvas problem” as a real pain point for professional designers. Pointing AI at this ​“problem” is really a way to expand the user base by lowering the bar for non-designers to participate.”

Christopher Butler wrote an essay on how details, focus, time, and taste elevate craft. ​“Attention to detail is not a personality trait; it is a manifestation of a preference for order and consistency. When that preference is fundamental, it makes it nearly impossible for a person to not see mistakes, flaws, inconsistencies, or differences. […] This is why attention to detail cannot (easily) be taught. Teaching a person to ​“see detail” requires them to care about and prefer certain forms of order.”

I’m always curious about how Figma’s engineering team operates at scale: ​“Migrating onto Kubernetes can take years. Here’s why we decided it was worth undertaking, and how we moved a majority of our core services in less than 12 months, all while making our compute platform easier to use.”

Vitaly Friedman from Smashing Magazine offers a few helpful templates, real-world applications, and insights on the importance of mapping both successful and unsuccessful touchpoints of user journeys to visualize the user experience.

Explaining systems thinking applied to design systems through an off-road vehicle platform? That’s my jam. ​“Nissan has developed a vehicle platform that gives it flexibility across a wide selection of vehicles. They leverage the same base component (the frame), and attached different components to that base in order to achieve the desired design. When building a design system, we should strive for a similar level of structure and flexibility. This gives us consistency while also allowing us to be adaptive and scale to our user’s needs.”

In-person attendees of Config 2024 received Issue 2 of The Prompt, a print magazine by Figma’s Story Studio and Brand Studio. A digital version is now available on the blog. ​“Featuring leaders working across design, engineering, product development, and the built environment, this collection of essays and interviews takes on questions about how AI might shape the way we create.”

After giving Slides a good try, Raquel Piqueras shares a few things she has been missing — a simple timer, access to sharing settings from the open presentation, slide-level components, and hotkeys to streamline the work.

Rauno from Vercel wrote a fantastic article with over 20 visual examples of using depth for design, animation, and interaction.

Bloomberg: ​“An investor group including Coatue Management, Alkeon Capital Management and General Catalyst Partners have invested in Figma Inc. as part of a deal that values the design startup at $12.5 billion, according to people with knowledge of the matter. ¶ The deal comes as the San Francisco-based company is delivering annual recurring revenue of more than $700 million, a figure that is projected to surpass $1 billion by next year, one of the people said, asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public. Yearly recurring revenue stood at about $400 million in late 2022.”