Articles

UserOnboard goes through an onboarding experience of Figma.

“Since presenting is a large part of both client-facing work and startup-building, Abigail spent the first three years of college refining her presentation skills in front of a variety of audiences: toy designers, vehicle inventors, entertainment executives, and more. Below, she shares her tips for developing and delivering a presentation that lands.”

Dylan Field: ​”Today, I’m excited to announce that Figma is opening a hub office in London, which will serve as our HQ for the EMEA region.”

Rasmus joined Figma in 2016 as a Lead Designer and one of the early employees. He just left the company, and in this post looks back at what he worked on over the years.

This is a great addition to the previous article. ​“Webhooks offer a first-class way to react to changes in Figma. In this article, we’ll build a small service in Node to listen for these events.”

Somehow I missed this article earlier this year, but it’s a good resource for creating an automated process to keep design tokens of the design tool in sync with the code behind it. They achieve this by setting up a Node.js server that generates Sass and Tailwind files with all the variables from the Figma API.

Tammy Taabassum created a design system in Figma for an existing product following the design thinking process. She started by assessing the situation (Discovery), set goals (Define), and only then built components and unified colors.

A guide to creating the perfect palette with Material Design. While it’s not strictly specific to Figma, the recommended Baseline Design Kit makes it easy to preview a custom color palette in the Material Design system.

Announcements from the above keynote, presented as a blog post. ​“We believe in embracing concepts from engineering and design, adopting the rigor and reusability of code while preserving the rapid iteration and uninhibited exploration that makes visual design so powerful. […] When code and design components mirror each other, teams can move much more efficiently. Today, we announced Variants, Interactive Components, and improvements to Auto Layout that will allow teams to do just that.”

Engineer Aashima Garg shares an inside look at Figma’s enterprise team and their work, spotlighting a recent project to improve the Organization admin experience.

A branding and digital agency BASIC worked with Herman Miller on redesigning a Design Within Reach (DWR) website to replicate the experience shoppers might have in a showroom. They used Figma prototypes for usability testing and took the redesign as an opportunity to create the first design system for all of Herman Miller brands.

A solid guide to Figma for developers from Smashing Magazine. It’s focused on navigating the app, measuring dimensions, exploring styles, exporting assets, getting CSS from the Code panel, and other parts of the developer handoff.

The team members from Shopify, Condé Nast, and Harry’s shared their experiences creating multi-brand design systems in a livestream a few months ago. This post shares some of the highlights from it.

“I struggled with the Figma Plugin examples to understand how to access data from the canvas and into my app. The Figma Plugin examples have a React application sample which sends data to the canvas, but not the other way around. While this is seemingly straight forward, I didn’t immediately absorb the explanations from Figma Plugin website. In retrospect, the way to do this is quite simple.”

Jason Jun shares the whole process of building a plugin, from the idea, to developing a data structure, interface design, and writing code. ​“The process of repeatedly finding relevant documents while using design tools can be cumbersome. This gap between the documentation and design tool seemed to be very suitable for a plugin to fill.”

Lennon Cheng shares his experience of creating Figma plugins to improve and automate the design process. He is a designer without much development experience, and this makes his take especially interesting.

A former designer at Lyft makes the case against using Figma in a large organization. Because Abstract uses a real Git repository to store Sketch files, it’s ​“allowing for a structured approach to file organization at a micro and macro level.” I’m not familiar with permissions on an Organization plan, but that sounds like a nightmare: “…imagine you have thousands of business-critical files shared by 250 designers all of which are editable by the whole team by default!”

“An appreciation piece on how well-modeled the Figma Community feature is and how it can possibly change the way the world designs digitally.”

Abigail Africa, a Student Fellow at Figma, on deciding whether or not to complete her degree this year in the middle of the pandemic. ​“Dylan, who left college to start Figma, offered to bring in other perspectives alongside his own. We invited a small handful of people we knew would be thoughtful on the topic to chat with Dylan over Zoom: Laura Deming, John Maeda, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Weiner, Karlie Kloss, and May-Li Khoe.”

Kiko Lam, an engineer on Figma’s collaboration team, shares her approach to the performance optimization project — investigating the underlying cause of slow performance, challenges with the existing implementation of comments, and the results of her work.