Articles

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.

Jonathan Saring shows and explains the process of creating a design system with components to standardize and scale the UI development process at Bit.

Willy Wu, Software Engineer at Figma, shares the backstory on the previous versions of Auto Layout, the product tradeoffs that were made, and how the feature has evolved over time. Seeing how the decisions were made really helps understand the feature better.

This tutorial shows how to create attractive blurred backgrounds to get your designs ready for iOS 14 and macOS Big Sur. It’s not specific to Figma, but the advice is solid.

“Putting a Frame inside another Frame sounds like madness, but it’s a core prototyping technique required for true Figma mastery.”

A smart approach to image optimization. The loading effect in the result looks very nice!

A design team at Mono took a dive into the Figma Community to look for high-quality Material Design and Android UI kits. They also show how to bring together components from all these kits into a project library. (Speaking of Mono, check out their free resources in the Community.)

A short overview of Variants, when to use them, current limitations, and how to get started.

“We recently expanded autosave in Figma so you can work offline without worrying about losing changes. Engineer Rudi Chen takes us behind the scenes of building this update: how we made product decisions, managed large merge conflicts, and navigated the complexities of Figma’s multiplayer technology.”

Sketch team wrote a beautiful essay on why they are committed to building a native Mac app. I love high-quality Mac apps, and Sketch is definitely one of them, but most of the time, design apps are not used in solitude. When it comes to collaboration, web-based multiplayer apps are just more open and efficient. See also comments on Hacker News.

Excited to see Adobe shipping new exciting features. ​“We’re introducing an entirely new way to design in XD with 3D Transforms. Now, you can move and rotate objects forwards, backwards, and across planes to bring depth and perspective to your designs and create new types of user experiences.”

Smashing Magazine published an in-depth look at several plugins that can speed up your design workflow.