Articles

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.

It’s finally here! 🙌 The biggest news of the last week is a long-awaited release of Auto Layout. When adding it to a frame, the items inside are stacked next to each other vertically or horizontally. The frame’s size is then determined by the total size of the items within it. This is a game-changer for working with components. Make sure to also check out a video tutorial.

This feature is only available for teams on enterprise-level Figma Organization plan, but thinking behind it is fascinating. Design System Analytics shows how the system and individual components are used across the team, and highlights if some of them are too rigid and get detached often.

An interesting look into issues and challenges that the infrastructure team at Figma is facing.

If you experience problems with desktop app performance this beta build may be worth trying.

A solid overview of some of the most useful plugins, ranging from generating content to organizing projects, creating visual effects, and even checking designs for WCAG conformity. Something for everyone.

Raquel Piqueras from Microsoft shares her approach to organizing Figma files for collaboration with designers, developers, PMs, researches, and other team members. Good advice on clearly communicating to others of what they are looking at and what is expected from them.

Great article by Ollie Jackson covering a lot of ground, including how to make prototypes more maintainable, communicate effectively with comments, organize text styles, and even integrate Tailwind CSS framework into a Figma design project. (If Tailwind CSS is your jam there is also a design kit for it in Community Projects section.)

Inc. Magazine recognized Figma cofounders Dylan Fields and Evan Wallace as ​“Rising Stars of 2019”, and Computer Science Department at Brown University talked to Dylan about what sparked the idea for the company.

Not specifically an article about Figma, but an argument that all you need to run a design team today is Notion for documentation and PM, Whimsical for diagramming and sketching ideas, and Figma for hi-fi design and prototyping. (I’d say that you can go further and replace Whimsical with Flowkit plugin described below.)

Introducing a redesigned workspace with a focus on the people in your team and Figma Community, ​“a public space where you can now publish live design files that anyone in the world can inspect, remix, and learn from.”

“Figma’s first user conference will take place on February 6, 2020, in San Francisco, CA. The cost is $299 but scholarships are available. Get involved by submitting our Call for Proposals or filling out our Attendee Application by November 20th.”

While Figma is most definitely not the right tool for the job here, it’s interesting to see how experiments like this push the limits of the tool. See also: Places I’d Rather Be by David Kulakevich at Figma Community.

Recap of a presentation at Figma Chicago Meetup. Trucy led the move to Figma at Yello and shares her experience in fostering collaboration with engineers, PMs, and other designers. I especially liked the idea of using custom cover images to indicate the statuses of tasks.

“This guide will walk through spacing and layout grid best practices based on Material Design, Bootstrap, and Figma.”

Another story about switching to Figma?! Yes, but this one also highlights how agency replaced not only Sketch but also InVision prototypes and Principle animations with it.