Articles

5 practical lessons for content designers on working content-first, collaborating with product designers, and using Figma to its wordiest potential.

A detailed guide on turning Figma design prototype into a native iOS or Android app without writing code. I’ve never used Bravo Studio before but it’s an interesting development in line with the current #NoCode trend.

An interesting observation that what we need next is states, styles groups, and variables. Yes, please!

Not sure if this post should be called ​“quick tips” as it mostly surfaces unresolved problems, but it’s an interesting look at the limitations of the current implementation.

Auto Layout can be used for so much more than just buttons and lists. This post shows how useful it is for working with copy and images.

An in-depth tutorial covering 3 common use cases for Auto Layout — button with an icon, content card, and a chat log screen.

With help from 12 industry experts, this article looks back at the decade and how the role of design transformed during it. ​“So to recap, in 2010 a few factors converged that motivated tech companies to invest more in design. To handle the transition to mobile, they needed people trained in the power of distilling complexity to its fundamental elements. Naturally, once users got accustomed to beautiful and easy-to-use experiences on mobile, that raised their standard for all user interfaces. At the same time, it got easier to start and build a tech company than ever before, so companies faced far more competitors and had to differentiate via their user experience.”

“What fonts, styles, and pantones are most popular? What frame sizes are most common? What does it look like, on the file level, for teams to design together?” Report based on data from over 50,000 active users.

Figma’s Data Scientist created an experiment to see if a well-maintained design system really saves time for designers. ​“We found that when participants had access to a design system they completed their objective 34% faster than without a design system.”

A comprehensive comparison of modern design tools, looking at features, extensibility, collaboration, supported platforms, and price. Not to spoil the result, but Figma takes the first place.

One of the most epic posts in Figma’s archive, diving deep into the history of leading and line height in traditional printing, desktop publishing, and on the web. It explains why Figma works with type the way it does.

It’s interesting to see how this team of 9 designers transitioned to Figma. I’m particularly impressed with their planning and communication with other team members. Part 1 provides some context for the switch.

Dan Strogiy writes about the pains of their previous Sketch workflow, the benefits of moving to Figma, their new organization system, and some fresh pains of a new workflow.

Figma announced the appointment of Lynn Vojvodich as the newest independent member of the company’s Board of Directors. ​“Ms. Vojvodich is an experienced leader who has built, grown and transformed businesses for more than 20 years. She served as Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Sales​force​.com and was a partner at Andreessen Horowitz where she helped portfolio companies accelerate their go-to-market strategies.”

Storybook is an open-source tool for developing UI components in isolation for React, Vue, and Angular. This article explores some of the Storybook addons for design. The Figma addon depicts the component design next to the implementation. Design changes will automatically be reflected in Storybook.

Mixkit Art found a creative way to use Figma as a CMS for illustrations. Their team manually prepares uploaded illustrations for multiple formats, and when they are ready to be published runs a Lambda script that connects to the Figma API, exports high-resolution assets, uploads them to S3, and makes them live on a website.

Zandre Coetzer shares 6 pieces of advice on moving design system to Figma — start building from scratch, don’t try to replicate your old system in Sketch, use both global and local components, highlight updated components, use plugins, and do it as a team.

Over 3,000 designers participated in this survey. While Sketch is still a leading tool for user flows, wireframing, UI design, prototyping, and design systems, Figma showed consistent growth in every category and was called ​“The most exciting tool of 2020”.

Figma is called ​“Tool of the Year” by this report. It’s not specifically about Figma but highlights some important trends in our industry related to it, like the death of design files and baked-in collaboration.

The article dives deeply into different methods of adding animations to designs in Figma — GIFs, Figmotion plugin, simple prototypes, and Smart Animate.