Articles

Jacob used Google Sheets Sync plugin to fill his designs with real medicine names while designing an online pharmacy that delivers NHS prescription medicine.

An epic blog post from Roman Shamin describes a better way of working with a dynamic color system and how to build an internal plugin that makes it possible.

It’s that time of the year again — time for annual rankings and ratings. Forbes published their annual ranking of the world’s top private cloud companies. Figma is #29 on the list.

Figma has hired Ken Norton as director of product. Ken spent more than fourteen years at Google, where he led product initiatives for Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Mobile Maps, and GV. After using Figma for nine months, he said he approached the company about joining.

Software engineer Jamie Wong tells a great story of debugging a sneaky bug in Figma when he found himself on an hour-long Lyft ride from San Francisco to Mountain View to meet a stranger who’d never heard of Figma.

If you’re not sure where to start with the recordings, this blog post introduces two talks: ​“Design systems as a service, not a product” by Declan Talbert, UX Designer at University of the Arts London, and ​“Failing Together” by Figma’s Product Manager Kelsey Whelan and Product Designer Nikolas Klein.

“As we reflect on the many takeaways from the conference, more than anything, we’re reminded how design has the power to bring us together. We’ve curated some of our favorite snippets on creating moments of connection — through the work you do, the products you build, or the way you show up in the community.”

Josh is an engineer on the design system team. Here, he shares advice for new grads as they think about taking the next step: choosing the right company, finding a role that fits their interests, and making the transition to the working world.

More highlights from the conference on how to build trust. ​“Trust is the backbone of an open and inclusive culture, and the right processes — which govern how you design, develop, and work together as a team — can, in turn, result in more open and inclusive products.”

Curated takeaways from Config Europe on the importance of trust amongst teammates, with clients, and in the broader design community.

“Now that it’s been a while since I switched from Sketch to Figma, I thought I’d try going back to my first design tool, MS Paint. As there is so much debate on what design tool to use, I wondered why we ever moved away from such a great tool in the first place.” At first, I thought it was a late April Fools’ joke, but it’s quite amazing to see what changed and what remained roughly the same for 25 years.

“Figma-Low-Code is an open-source project that enables the direct inclusion of Figma designs in Vue applications. By ensuring that the Figma design stays the single source of truth, this approach reduces the need for design hand-offs and front-end code significantly.”

A new Figma tutorial from Headway, showing how to use Figma UI Kits to bring design ideas to life faster.

Backstage is Spotify’s homegrown developer portal. This article shows how to design for it using a combination of Figma and Storybook.

Figma is a 2020 Innovation by Design winner in User Experience category. Fast Company credits it, at least partially, with enabling companies to work remotely. ​“Figma has become the virtual whiteboard of the pandemic.”

A great in-depth profile of Dylan Field at Business Insider.

Marcin Wichary digs into how font fallback works. As always, his post is a deep dive into the topic. Highly recommend!

While feature introducing Variants of the same component is currently in beta, this help article provides recommendations on how to prepare for its release in November.

Figma added two new integrations — one for keeping designs up-to-date in GitLab issues, and another for converting mockups into web pages with Maker. This article talks about some recently-launched integrations to help your product team collaborate in Figma.

Two features announced on the Config Europe are already live! New Instance Swap menu and updated Inspect tab help both designers and developers navigate large, complex libraries in Figma.