Articles

A tutorial on creating complex interactive buttons in Figma. This is a follow-up to the article How to Make Simple Interactive Buttons in Figma in 2 Steps, which demonstrated a more basic approach.

An overview of tools for converting Adobe Illustrator files to Figma. Based on this test, XD2Sketch works the best and has a comprehensive set of converters between popular design tools (the name is misleading), but their price is steep.

Speaking of Zeplin, this is a pretty good overview of how a digital agency ArcTouch uses it together with Figma.

Warren Tobias describes the whole process of developing a proper design system and replacing Sketch, Abstract, and Flinto with Figma. Interestingly, they continued using Zeplin for the handoff process as their development and engineering team is mostly outsourced.

Two Dropbox employees joined forces to create an internal Figma workshop for all design-adjacent roles in the company. This blog post tells how the project came together and shares their slides as a Community resource.

“If you’ve added a description when publishing changes to your team library, your collaborators will now be able to see your notes as they review the updates.” Also, Figma Organization Admins can now turn templates off for their organization.

Multiple updates in a single release. First, Styles can now be reordered, grouped together, and opened in a floating window. Second, you can add co-creators to your public Community files and plugins. And last, Figma files can be embedded in Asana’s project overview.

When creating a new Figma file, you can now choose from a selection of common presets and Community templates to get started. (I first wrote about templates back in July of 2020, but then it was only a limited trial.)

Figma profile by Index Ventures, with insights from Sho Kuwamoto and Dylan Field.

Dropbox went fully remote last year, and in this post, they discuss changes to the workflow. ​“After migrating their design organization to Figma from Sketch back in 2018, the Dropbox design team had a head start when it came to remote collaboration. The team already had established best practices for virtually every stage of the creation process — brainstorming, wireframing, prototyping, and commenting. […] But once the pandemic hit and the team went fully remote, they needed to do more.”

“At Figma, we believe in continuously investing in product quality and developer productivity by looking at recurring types of bugs and addressing them in a systematic way. A few months ago, our engineering team completed a large effort that achieves both: turning on the strictNullChecks compiler flag for our front-end TypeScript codebase.”

A solid overview of the most popular plugins, tutorials, and resources.

Pavel Babkin shows examples of creating UI interactions, adding special effects, and even animating basic game characters with the Figma Motion plugin.

I didn’t realize how many popular plugins were made by the Discord team and started as their internal tools! In this blog post, Daniel Destefanis shares their approach to building tools to prevent design debt, spend less time doing repetitive tasks, and improve the developer handoff process.

Results from a fantastic survey of over 4,000 designers run by Taylor Palmer. Figma basically destroyed the competition in almost every category this year. Compare with the results from 2019 that I shared a year ago in Issue #3.

In this guest post Kylie Poppen, Design Lead at Google, shares a framework for thinking about the 90,000 hours that make up your career — whether you’re looking for a new role, hiring for your team, or just evaluating your next step.

Great essay by Dylan Field on their decision to build Figma in the browser. ​“Initially I didn’t understand the negative reactions to Figma’s closed beta launch. I only saw the obvious benefits: a single source of truth for files, cross platform support, and multiplayer editing. Now I understand that the power of the browser lies in the broader cultural change it delivers — and this change can be scary. The browser is natively multiplayer. It forces a mindset shift on access. It strips away the need for expensive hardware. And it pushes us to embrace working together, especially when we are blocked and our default might be to hide.”

A few plugin recommendations for working with content and data from the team at Simple Thread.

A comprehensive list of Figma plugins for an overall design process.

Using the power of AutoLayout 3 to build a table with reorderable and resizable columns and rows.