Articles

A recap of everything that got shipped in October: new FigJam capabilities (see below), Interactive Components, and Branching. A busy month after a multi-year effort!

Interactive Components are now available to everyone! Thanks to this powerful feature, we can now create reusable and shareable interactive elements for design systems and prototypes. (If you didn’t participate in the beta and want to catch up with new possibilities, check out the Interactive Components topic at the Figmalion website or this Twitter thread by Figma.)

“For the infrastructure team, the question was: how do we empower our product engineers to build these real-time views easily, while abstracting away the complexity of pushing data back and forth? To provide a general solution to this fundamental business need, we developed LiveGraph, a data fetching layer on top of Postgres that allows our frontend code to request real-time data subscriptions expressed with GraphQL.”

“Today’s launch of Anima 5 marks another milestone on our mission to perfect the design-to-development workflow: truly functioning Material Design in Figma and Adobe XD. This means you can now build prototypes using actual code-based Material UI components.”

“Creating components with automated sizing behavior saves a lot of time during the process. They also let us think more like a developer that has to implement the real application. That is why it is essential to master Constraints and Auto Layout in Figma.”

John Fuetsch, Software Engineer at Figma, explains why they’ve built branching. ​“Branches are exploratory spaces that enable designers to try new ideas without changing the main file until they’re ready and approved. They are especially useful for preserving the integrity of approved designs, while making room for work that’s experimental or iterative in nature, like contributing to a design library and previewing work for stakeholders.”

Ana Boyer on the best practices and strategies for collaborating in FigJam throughout the entire design process — from your first brainstorm to the final review.

Emily Lin, the lead product manager of FigJam, shared some of her experiences and lessons learned from launching FigJam with a team at Productboard.

You can now mix different text sizes in the same text box, sticky note, or shape.

Karl Emil James Koch writes for 8px Magazine about using group renaming and his plugin the Batch››styler to migrate a design system from Sketch to Figma.

A quick summary of all the recent updates to Figma and FigJam.

Import and export CSV files as sticky notes, copy-paste spreadsheet cells, and export selected objects or the entire board as a PNG, PDF, or JPG. See the video on how to use these features.

Tom Quinonero writes about a recently announced headless approach to building Figma plugins.

A comprehensive guide on prototyping in Figma, covering interactions, animations, fix positions, overflow scrolling, and interactive components.

The team at Lokalise collected the most creative ways to use Figma and talked with designers from LinkedIn, Netflix, King, and Bumble to reveal how they work with it.

“Last year, the Figma security team built a simple solution for zero-trust shell access on AWS. To do this, they leveraged AWS SSO and Systems Manager, an umbrella of services that provide monitoring and remote administration capabilities over various AWS resources. In this post, Security Engineer Hongyi Hu explains how the team designed the system and shares some tips to help other teams secure Systems Manager and protect their most sensitive data.”

Miguel Cardona shares four principles for facilitating collaborative design in the classroom from professor Christie Shin at The Fashion Institute of Technology.

Fascinating write-up of converting a massive set of data table components into a unified variant.

A few tips on managing the workload as a single designer — from ways to optimize processes to Figma techniques and plugins that can save you time in the long run.

Vijay Verma (who you may remember by fantastic illustrations made in Figma) writes about building and scaling Sushi, Zomato’s in-house design system. While this post is not about Figma, I like how he broke down the process of building a design system into specific steps: auditing the UI inventory, formulating the foundation, creating component libraries, governing the system, building support for all platforms, and mapping workflows and onboarding.