Articles

The Wall Street Journal writes about Figma being used for fun stuff not related to work, like off-sites for team-building, fan art, interior design, and even wedding-planning.

“We recently introduced commenting on files in the Figma Community, allowing you to ask questions, share your opinion, or offer feedback. Here, engineer Emily Zhong shares how she and a team across design, product, and engineering thought anew about what it means to connect and engage in the community.”

Marc Andrew gives valuable tips and advice on the best way to start your own design system.

“A few weeks back, we asked ten Figmates across engineering, product, design, and research to share what they love most about Figma, including their favorite use cases and tricks. During a recent live stream, they walked through speed tips and keyboard shortcuts, brainstorming exercises, and their most-used templates — all in five minutes or less.”

The plugin author’s tutorial on creating a design linter specific to your team.

Steve Ruiz looks at the evolution of prototyping tools in Figma: ​“Interactive Components might not have been meant to make text inputs or games, but when you give talented people simple tools to use, they can make some pretty amazing things. And I am sure that the feature was made to be fun — and in that sense, mission accomplished!”

An interview with Luis about working remotely and what it’s like to be a design advocate at Figma.

“In this post I want to tell you my first experience with Figma, how I am defining my design system, what resources I have found and how to create slides with your own brand.”

“Explore what wireframing is, and why it’s worth doing it with Figma — the most-used UI design tool on the market today.”

“We will teach you how to choose the right shade and contrast of colors, how to structure them properly according to their uses. In addition, we will talk about how colors should be properly applied to Light and Dark modes, followed by some tips and tricks, and finally, teach you a quick and easy way to switch from Light to Dark mode with just a few buttons.”

How Dropbox uses Figma’s Smart Animate feature to illustrate product design concepts.

“In 2017, InVision was the top prototyping tool, with 60% of UXTool survey respondents indicating they used it. Only three years later, their user share fell to 23%, with more than half of those people only using it as a secondary tool. In contrast, Figma has seen an explosion of growth and popularity, rising from about 8% of respondents using the tool in 2017 to about 57% in 2020.”

Students of Justus Wunschik’s online class came together to build a beautiful SimCity-inspired city with Figma.

A new tutorial from Blush, based on Pablo Stanley’s Figma Crash Course on YouTube. ​“Learn the basics of Figma’s new Auto Layout and speed up your creative workflow with this awesome feature.”

Creating responsive prototypes with Figma and Anima.

Komal Javed from Shopify shows how to set up your Figma projects to meet the needs of your whole team. Project Index Template is available in Figma Community.

Johan Ronsse makes an argument against overusing advanced Figma features. After breaking down a few complex Variants into smaller Components or being unable to freely move an object in the layout built with Auto Layout, I tend to agree. With great power comes great responsibility.

Uber took a programmatic approach to create 256 new components for map markers. ​“By automating the construction of the markers, I was able to avoid human-error and efficiently generate the full set of variants. Programmatically testing the components allowed me to thoroughly validate them under multiple scenarios and be confident of their quality.”

Luke Cardoni, UX Lead at REI, recently spent time improving the accessibility of form elements in their design system, Cedar. ​“It turned out that these UI components posed the perfect opportunity to start exploring Figma’s Variants feature, as each Text Input, Radio Button, and Checkbox has so many, well, variants.”

Netflix presents Hawkins, their design system widely used across the Netflix Studio’s growing application catalog, which consists of 80+ applications. In this blog post, they explain why Hawkins was built, how they got buy-in across the engineering organization, and what their plans are moving forward. (BTW, the cover illustration is made by Martin Bekerman, whose other artworks you can see below.)