Articles

If one of the existing plugins won’t do it, Pavel Laptev explains how to build a plugin from scratch for populating layers with data from JSON files.

On a similar note, this post demonstrates how to get data to Figma from product information system (PIM) Crystallize using GraphQL Data Fill plugin. (The plugin is universal and can be used with other GraphQL services as well.)

The tutorial explains the concept of content-first design and shows how to connect real content to elements in Figma files.

In this short video, two Principal Analysts from Forrester Research discuss their takeaways and impressions from the conference.

One young designer, three amazing conferences. Great writeup by Michelle Chiu from MongoDB.

Elsma Ramirez from SoFi shares her notes from the conference and highlights talks and speakers that inspired her the most. Her favorites: ​“Welcome to a new decade of design” by Dylan Field, ​“The city guide to open source” by Devon Zuegel from GitHub, and ​“Design System Showcase”.

Dylan Field, CEO of Figma, reflects on the conference, Figma community, open design, and some key themes that emerged from a collective discussion.

Daniel Hollick wrote a 6‑part step-by-step tutorial for writing a color contrast checker plugin for Figma.

The team at Salsa Digital agency shared their experience of switching from Sketch to Figma. While they enjoy real-time collaboration, lack of ​“really-final-this-time-v5” files, and all the unique features of Figma, they also have some valid concerns about committing to it for a long time.

Samuel shares a few tips on organizing Figma files.

A list of 5 solid principles for building components — reusability, nesting, UI and UX patterns, reusing styles, and consistent naming structure.

“A strategy that may help ease some of the pain and confusion when deprecating unwanted components.” That’s something we all have to do from time to time, so I’m glad Steve Dennis documented his approach.

Great Ask-Me-Anything at Designer News with Noah Levin, Design Director at Figma. He answers questions about sourcing new design hires, interview process at Figma, internal and external transparency, latest product announcements, and more.

A thoughtful post-Config essay on the role of Figma multiplayer, designing in an open space, and community.

Fantastic overview of the conference and talks from Knut Melvær. If you have time to read only one piece from an attendee, this should be it.

Official recap of new features announced at Config. More responsive Auto Layout, an updated font picker, improvements to color selection, hyperlinking, and new prototype permissions settings.

Not a new help article, but a good reminder. I’ve seen a lot of panic on Twitter during the outage, but as long as you already have files open in the app and don’t close them, all changes should seamlessly sync when a connection is established again. Still, it’s worth manually saving .fig files from time to time while working offline or during the outage to have a backup.

In case you experienced an outage last week, this is a technical roundup of what happened. The most important part for designers: ​“We’re kicking off an initiative to ensure you can continue to work on your already open files safely after going offline even if you close your browser before coming back online.”

Figma announces integration with Maze, a service that provides design teams with UX insights from real users. You can also read the announcement at Maze.

Figma team shares how they’ve built a unified design system for their marketing site, then implemented it in Contentful CMS.