Articles

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.

Links (announced at Config 2020) and Universal Search are finally here! Check out Links Playground + Game to learn how to use them.

The team at Figma is exploring ways of working remotely. Alia Fite shares some ideas on how to kick off and run a remote brainstorm session.

Students Who Design is an online platform using Figma to teach product design. In this guest post, they go through students onboarding, organizing files, teaching classes, and providing project feedback all within Figma.

After starting working remotely during the pandemic, Figma’s top priority has been finding ways to stay connected while far apart. This article shows how they are making a remote team still feel real.

Thanks to Figma’s commitment to open web, Framer X just introduced Figma importer. This is great news for people interested in interaction design and advanced prototyping.

Index Ventures asked experienced leaders from their portfolio companies, including Figma and Slack, to share their expertise and advice on working from home.

Yuan Qing Lim shares ten heuristics for crafting plugins for Figma, based on his experience of building over a dozen of them.

A proposal for Figma to introduce Tokens panel with manually added values that can be reused across properties of objects and then exported to a developer-friendly format.

Using virtual post-it notes in Figma to capture feedback and thoughts in remote usability testing.

Luis Ouriach from Upgrade Pack explains why and how their team migrated to Figma.

Yuhki Yamashita, VP of Product at Figma, gives an inside look at how they designed the fastest way to keep an entire company up-to-date on the roadmap using a Coda doc.

Great examples of solving your own problems and annoyances with plugins. The author also shares some good thoughts on plugins’ usability.

Laura Escobar shares five key principles that prevent a design file from becoming the mayhem no one wants to use — using global styles, creating content structure, organizing layers hierarchically, reusing components, and following naming conventions.