Articles

A framework for evaluating design tools from the team at Figma. ​“To find the right fit, it’s not just about reading countless articles and reviews to identify the ​‘best in class‘ option. Rather, there are a number of considerations — team size, distribution, workflow — that should inform the decision.”

After leading two migrations from Sketch, Abstract, and Zeplin to Figma in the past two years, Iougo Huan shares what he learned to help your team in the migration process.

While the title mentions only Adobe XD, I liked how they also tried Sketch for Teams and Framer X before settling on Figma. Their final scoresheet is very detailed and seems quite accurate.

What makes this switch story interesting is their previous setup with the design system source of truth in React components and automatic generation of Sketch symbols from them. While switching to Figma, they ended up manually recreating components, and that resulted in a higher quality comparing to auto-generated Sketch symbols.

A recap from a presentation that product designer Helena Jaramillo from Coda recently gave. ​“In my experience, knowing how and when to collaborate with others plays a large factor in a project’s success. Here’s a look at how I’ve worked to bring engineers into the design process as early as possible.”

Nine things that team at Si digital learned while collaborating on projects in Figma. ​“If it’s a small project, two can be a crowd for side by side designing. Bring in a large project with a ton of pages and a tight deadline, two becomes the only way to deliver.”

The team at Evil Martians shares how designers and engineers can speak the same language by using dynamic components built with Auto Layout. The article presents multiple techniques with good animated examples.

David Hoang is a Director of Design at Webflow and teaches UX Design at General Assembly. He provides an interesting look at how COVID-19 forced him to lean on Figma to be the core foundation of how they’d approach learning.

That blog post made the rounds lately, and for a good reason. If you’re curious about a bigger picture of why Figma is so important, it’s a must-read. Also, see the discussion on HackerNews.

“Hold the Option or Alt key while in Vector Edit mode to see precise measurements between points.” The team at Figma is on fire lately — there was at least one app update in every issue since March!

“Twice a year, we set aside a week for everyone at the company to explore a project outside of their daily responsibilities. Unlike hackathons — which are largely built for engineering and design — Maker Week is for everyone, across teams and skillsets.”

“At Early Stage, we’ll talk to Field about staying patient during the product development process and then transitioning into an insane growth sprint. We’ll also chat about the fundraising process, how he built a team from scratch, and how he took the team remote in the midst of a pandemic, as well as chatting about the product development strategy behind Figma.”

Dylan Field shares how he and Evan Wallace came up with the idea for Figma. In the first part, he shares his original pitch in the Thiel Fellowship application from 2011.

Varun Vachhar walks readers through the process of building a simple confetti plugin from scratch.

“We sorted Figma’s plug-ins on most downloaded and we took on testing the top 50 in the list. Here is what we found out.“

Pavel Laptev shares the experience of using a design system approach in Alteos, including how they use Figma API to share design tokens with code.

A detailed look into how Microsoft is building a cross-platform Fluent Design System. They have an interesting take on building a Figma plugin to move away from fixed values and toward consistent design tokens that later translated into platform-specific code values.

I wrote about the illustration library and plugin Blush in the last issue. Now, Elsma Ramirez shares how she created The Munchies collection for it using a component-based approach.

“Auto Layout has been around for a while, but not everyone’s aware of the benefits it brings. It doesn’t replace constraints, they’re still very much needed. The trick is to use the right feature where necessary. I want to show you how to combine components, constraints, and Auto Layout for the best results.”

An interesting approach of using pre-defined spacer components and Auto Layout for managing space in design mockups.