Articles

Gabriel Valdivia on Figma AI: ​“Right before Figma’s keynote announcing the ​“make designs” button, I ​“made code” with another app. On one hand, people can now use Figma to replace designers, while on the other hand, I’m using Cursor to replace engineers. I’m stuck in the middle feeling simultaneously disempowered as a designer and completed empowered to make new software.”

Recap and wishlist from Joey Banks: ​“While the updates felt a little more iterative this time around rather than innovative, what Figma shared seems to be paving the way for all that’s near and far ahead. In case you missed the product keynote, or if perhaps you’d just like a recap of the highlights from the perspective of a design systems designer, I’d love to share all that’s new with you in this newsletter.”

A short recap of everything that was announced at Config in a blog post.

See also an updated What’s New page.

I had no idea that a Spread value in drop shadows can be negative! This effect could shrink the shadow and simulate the object’s elevation. The article explains the box-shadow property in CSS, but luckily, Figma’s drop shadow is based on it and works similarly. 

“For the first installment in our series, we sat down with the Linear team who put forth a series of principles to guide their own work. Here, co-founder Jori Lallo and Chief Operating Officer Cristina Cordova share why opinionated software is core to Linear’s methodology, and how other teams can adopt it.”

My favorite part from Jori: ​“Many people try to adapt things from the industry that might not actually be applicable to them, or they might not know the potential downside. They were developed at places that are bigger and growing faster than most companies, so you need to try to understand what’s behind them and adapt pieces of them.”

Typography variables can now be scoped to limit which properties they can be applied to. For example, if you scope a number variable to font size, you can only apply the variable to font size.

Also, copying and pasting an object bound to local variables will no longer populate a file with local variables unless you choose to in a tooltip.

What I like about Linear is how clearly they define principles and ideas that drive their product decisions. You can either love or hate how opinionated they are, but that clarity is admirable. ​“At Linear we believe software can feel magical. Quality of software is driven by both the talent of its creators and how they feel while they’re crafting it. To bring back the right focus, these are the foundational and evolving ideas Linear is built on.”

Not a new article, but a good one by Josh Comeau. ​“Scope cuts are generally decided by product managers, but they don’t make that decision alone. It often starts with a conversation between the designer and the developer. If these two people trust each other, the process is collaborative, cordial, and productive. They figure out the best solution under the current constraints, taking development time and user experience into account, and then pitch it to the PM. If the PM trusts the designer and developer, and their proposed solution works from a product perspective, it’s typically approved without any fuss.”

Two Software Engineers at Figma — Isaac Goldberg and Naomi Jung — explain how dynamic page loading improved the slowest load times by 33%. ​“Performance should correspond to user-perceived complexity. If a user loads a page with only a few frames, Figma should be able to display their canvas almost instantly, even if the file has dozens of other pages with hundreds of frames each. By examining usage patterns, we learned that many users were treating files as projects — using one file to house all aspects of a workstream — so most didn’t even navigate to all pages in a single session. We realized that we could drastically improve load times and reduce memory by dynamically loading content as needed, rather than populating all content at once.”

“We are starting to roll out an easier way to mark frames ready for dev. Select a frame to see the </> icon appear at the top right, then click. You’ll see the ready for dev status also reflected in your selection actions.”

Changes to sharing and access settings ​“to create a more consistent sharing experience and give you clearer visibility into and control over content permissions,” being released through mid-June. New team access terminology, clarified UI for inheriting project access by the team members and child file access by the project members, a dedicated prototype share dialog, a branch’s audience and role, and a central place for sharing other forms, views, and artifacts of the file. (Pre-Config cleanup for something new?)

Throughout May, drafts are being moved into teams on the Starter and Professional plans. This change was poorly communicated and caused a public outcry, but I don’t actually think it’s unfair or a big deal. Historically, drafts haven’t been associated with a team. This made work ownership unclear, and teams couldn’t use advanced paid features like Dev Mode while working on drafts. Moving forward, drafts will be associated with a team, and existing files will need to be moved. Drafts stay private and can be shared view-only for free, but users will need paid seats to share drafts with others and to edit other teammates’ drafts. The free plan still includes 3 collaborative design files. This change puts a limit on teams collaborating in drafts but feels more like closing a loophole than a dark pattern.

33% faster file loading and 33% fewer memory issues! ​“To ensure even the largest Figma design files can be used as efficiently as possible, Figma dynamically loads pages. When a file is opened, only the page that you land on is loaded (usually the first page in a file). This means a file with hundreds of pages can open as quickly as a file with just a few! Figma loads additional pages as you navigate to them. If an unloaded page is particularly complex, you may experience a brief pause when you navigate to the page.” Certain actions like searching across all pages, reviewing updates, or running a plugin or widget that needs the whole file may cause the file to load all pages.

Huge performance boost. See this Twitter thread from Bersabel Tadesse, Director of Product at Figma, on the journey to shipping this release: ​“Our architecture was built around files being the atomic unit of work, but users were treating pages as their atomic unit of work. So it didn’t make sense to keep optimizing within the current architecture—or worse, try and change how our users work.”

“Cloud-based designer platform Figma is closing a deal to allow its employees and early investors to sell their stake to new and existing investors at a valuation of $12.5 billion, the company said on Thursday.” Good news for the team. After the Adobe deal was canceled, I assumed they’d do a liquidity event for employees and early investors.

“Figma is widely considered as a candidate to go public after antitrust regulators in Europe and Britain in December blocked what would have been among the biggest acquisitions of a software startup. New investors including Fidelity, Franklin Venture Partners and existing ones such as Sequoia and a16z are expected to acquire stakes totaling about $600 million to $900 million in the secondary sale. Figma was last valued at $10 billion in a private funding round in 2021.”

LottieFiles: ​“We are thrilled to announce that we have received strategic investments from Figma Ventures and Webflow Ventures, marking a significant milestone in our journey to democratize motion design.”

Matthew Ström explores the concept of ​“polish” in design and its paradoxical nature by looking at a few examples. ​“The polish paradox is that the highest degrees of craft and quality are in the spaces we can’t see, the places we don’t necessarily look. Polish can’t be an afterthought. It must be an integral part of the process, a commitment to excellence from the beginning. The unseen effort to perfect every hidden aspect elevates products from good to great.”

Charlota K. Blunarova shares her observations and experience with using AI-generated assets in branding work. Those are truly beautiful projects, and I love her approach to using AI to expedite the execution phase so she can explore more ideas while dedicating more time to the strategic phase and project refinement.

A tutorial on creating an AI-powered Figma plugin that generates colors based on your descriptions. It’s pretty cool to see how accessible it becomes to build a plugin using LLM (in this case, OpenAI).

Niki Tonsky claims that ​“we, as a civilization, forgot how to center things.” As always, his essay gets into nitty-gritty design details in the most hilarious way. He explains how CSS, font metrics, and icons get in the way of centering things and what designers and developers can do about them.

Designer Advocate Clara is interviewed by Lovers Magazine about her path into design, getting inspiration, community work, and workstation.