Articles

FigJam is now available on iPad! Beta testing was announced back in January, and I’m really glad they started with FigJam. While I can’t see myself using the iPad for high-fidelity work, it’s perfect for making low-fidelity sketches with Apple Pencil or laying out flows. See the Twitter thread by Robert Bye, Product Manager of Mobile and Desktop Apps at Figma, on making some of these decisions while building the app.

Anton Kuznetsov shares two workarounds for creating negative spacing with Auto Layout. The easy way is to use Space Between, but there are some limitations, so Anton offers using a frame as a wrapper.

Joey Banks talks about his approach to organizing and naming in Figma.

”Product Manager Emily Lin shares the process of bringing FigJam to life, from beta to GA.“

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.”