Articles

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.

Figma introduced new ways to communicate without leaving Figma and FigJam — audio calls, cursor chat, and high fives. Press forward-slash (/) on the keyboard to start a chat message. Chat and high-fives are truly innovative, delightful, and low-friction ways to communicate with your team. Bravo!

3rd-party developers can now build plugins and widgets for FigJam. Plugins in FigJam work similarly to Figma, and existing Figma plugins can even be republished for FigJam. Widgets are more like native FigJam objects — similar to sticky notes, shapes, and connectors — except they’re custom and built by you. For now, this API is in closed beta, but it creates an incredible opportunity for building almost anything inside FigJam.

A recap of the updates to Figma and FigJam that were shipped last month.

Figma’s VP of Product, Yuhki Yamashita, shares what it was like to build FigJam and how things have changed since then. In this post, he reflects on the evolving role of design and product management, what it means to welcome ​“non-designers” into the process, and the future of FigJam.

“Over the last few months, the Figma security team has built out a system to securely provide access to internal applications using reusable cloud components and modern security technologies. We think this is a powerful pattern that can help teams across the industry protect their most sensitive internal apps. Here, Security Engineer Max Burkhardt is sharing a look at how we built the system, what we learned, and how this fits into our broader approach to security at Figma.”

The product design team at Figma shares how they use FigJam, their online whiteboard, to be more generative as a team and with their cross-functional partners. Make sure to also check out the full livestream of the conversation and the community file with some of the components they use.

Figma was featured in Forbes’ The Cloud 100 list. ​“As Google Docs did for word processing and GitHub for code, so Dylan Field’s Figma is doing for design. Employees at companies like Netflix, Airbnb, Zoom, and Discord are all users.”

A few of the less known shortcuts and tips for effective use of Figma from Ansh Mehra.

Speaking of plugins, in this 3‑part blog series Clinton Halpin shows how he built one to automatically fill mockups with real data from his company’s API in a single click.

Smashing Magazine’s new guide to useful Figma plugins, from color management and image assets to SVG shapes and animation.

Molly Hellmuth wrote a guide on everything you need to know about setting up icons, using icons in designs, and handing off icons for development in Figma. See also her top 10 tips from this guide on Twitter.

Jory Raphael is a lead designer at Font Awesome, maker of the popular icon set. They recently switched to Figma to design and manage their icons, and here he shares ten reasons behind this decision. Lots of nitty-gritty vector editing details!

“For historical reasons, Figma used to convert between spaces and hyphens when dealing with SVG files. This made it hard to export icons from Figma to SF Symbols, so we fixed it.”

It’s finally possible to move published components between files without breaking links to instances in the design system! Besides that, now you can swap out an entire library in a single bulk action and find the right component in a quick search modal. Fantastic update that I’m really excited about. See a backstory by Sho Kuwamoto on how they were built.

“Our growing sales team partners with our users and their organizations to help them build better products from start to finish and scale their creative processes, while also working with Figma’s internal teams to improve our own products. We sat down with a few Figmates to learn what it’s like to be a member of a global sales organization, including getting smart on all things design, career growth, and the best part about working directly with users.”

“In a recent livestream, Figma’s PM team gave us a peek into their team norms. Here, we’re sharing how their culture of transparency and trust comes to life in their daily habits and weekly syncs, and what it means to open up their processes to cross-functional partners.“

Smart and delightful use of animation in the UI. See also the original file at Figma.

Tom Quinonero shows how to build a simple Figma plugin with Rollup and Svelte.

Interesting perspective on Figma vs. Sketch from Jishnu Hari, who took the usual route of switching from Figma to Sketch while joining a new company. He really missed some of the things we take for granted in Figma, and in the end, convinced his team to switch back to Figma.