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“A spokesperson told TechCrunch that this deal was ​“opportunistic,” and that the company was in a strong cash position pre-financing. The new funding expands Figma’s runway during these uncertain times, with coronavirus halting a lot of enterprise purchasing and ultimately slowing growth of some rising enterprise players. “ Also interesting: ​“Field also added that he has not met other investors in this round in person, and the vast majority of the deal was done over Zoom.”

Forbes: ​“But Figma also plans to use the money to consider acquisitions and ​“acquihires,” in which a company will purchase a startup not for its intellectual property, but for its talent, as part of Figma’s next phase of expansion.”

Andreessen Horowitz: ​“Figma puts all the pieces together, and into more than the sum of those parts. What used to take four or five discrete tools can now be done end-to-end in Figma, the single source of ​“truth” for product design and design systems. […] Their community has taken off with a product-led virality that I haven’t seen since GitHub — extending beyond product designers and into product managers, marketers, and engineers.”

Dylan Field: ​“Today, I’m excited to share that Figma has raised a $50M Series D round of funding, led by Peter Levine and Marc Andreessen at a16z.”

You can now turn off the Figma toolbar and footer in Presentation View without going full screen.

A beta channel for the desktop app is now available — you can run it side-by-side with the existing stable desktop app.

Miguel Cardona teaches New Media Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and shares some of the activities that he does with students in Figma.

Great to see how Figma’s mission to make the design more accessible empower underrepresented communities.

Figma for Education program now includes online courses, bootcamps, school-sponsored hackathons, and more.

A few tactics for making remote user research a little easier, including tips on doing user interviews and collaborating on shared boards.

Alia Fite makes a point that prototypes don’t always have to be high-fidelity. She shares the benefits of lightweight prototypes and some ways the team at Figma is using them.

“Figma is in talks to raise a new funding round from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz at a valuation of $2 billion, multiple sources with knowledge of the matter tell Forbes. The round, which is still being finalized, is expected to raise at least $50 million, three sources say.”

A shared Figma community project Stay at Home Valley got featured in Fast Company. The article highlights lots of smart details, so it’s worth checking even if you saw the project before.

Good thoughts on the future of Sketch and competing with Figma. I used to love Sketch, but can’t see what can save it from a slow decline at this point.

A review of free Figma resources recently published by a community.

Chieri Wada describes a life-changing experience of attending Figma conference two months ago, then looks at how the same design community came up with creative ways to stay in touch while social distancing. (Seriously, can you believe the conference was only 2.5 months ago?!)

Marc Andrew, a creator of Cabana Design Kit featured in the last issue, shows how to put together your kit to kick-start design projects faster. Part 1 covers color palettes, typography styles, and shadows.

Jack Roles talks through the difficulties his team was facing using Sketch, why they selected Figma for creating Babylon DNA design system, and what they’re still learning.

The product design team at VMware switched to working from home during the pandemic and piloted a remote design sprint within one of their groups. In this post, they share the process and takeaways.

Spotify Design shares how they have shaped Figma to their needs and culture. This post focuses on file structure: ​“Allowing multiple people into the same file doesn’t automatically lead to better collaboration. Our files would need to be organised in a way that is visible and discoverable by everyone. After all, you can’t collaborate on work that you can’t find.” See also: Spotify Ways of Working.