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.
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.)
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.