Articles

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.

“After finalizing and polishing their work in Figma, designers often expect developers to magically make sense of it. However, as that’s not usually the case, things can end up looking pretty grim. What’s going wrong?” The authors blame the outdated handoff mindset and suggest the four steps that can turn the handoff process from a potential headache into a smooth collaboration.

Joey Banks recaps the Framework announcements. On choosing between styles and variables: ​“Wait, but styles don’t allow for modes, right? Wouldn’t the use of styles prevent us from switching themes or brands? Actually, this is what I’m most excited about with this update, and it’s the further positioning of how styles can be useful in combination with variables. Because all styles (yes, typography now, too!) can use variables, adjusting one variable mode within a style will adjust all variables to reflect that new mode change.”

Chad Bergman continues the series on getting started with design systems with a walkthrough of the basics of creating a system tailored to your unique goals and challenges, whether building from scratch or starting with existing pieces.

Jacob Miller, a Product Manager for Design Systems at Figma, gives an overview of everything launched at Framework — Code Connect for developers, typography and gradient variables, and the new Library Analytics API. All of the above is designed to drive design system adoption across the teams because ​“building a design system is only half the battle — the real challenge is getting it adopted by both designers and developers.” If you missed the event, that’s one summary you need.

“Create a FigJam board during or outside of a Google Meet call to jam remotely or in person.”

“Now, your team can access Figma library data outside of the app, so you can organize the data based on your organization’s needs. This will include component insertion, detachment, and instance data, as well as team and file-level breakdowns. Enterprise plans only.”

“Code Connect is a tool for design systems and engineering teams to bring component code into Dev Mode. When inspecting a component with connected code snippets, developers will see design system code from their libraries instead of auto-generated code.” Currently in beta. Available on Enterprise or Organization plans only.

Sam shares math equations she used in Token Studio to build all sorts of dimension tokens and even a proportional scale that snaps to a 4 or 8 pixel grid. This guide uses typography as an example, but the same ideas apply to sizing and spacing. There is even a free playground in the Community.

“The Washington Post’s inclusive process for creating new design system components bridges the gap between design and development to make features that help navigate the news online.”

Ana Boyer wonders, what if we also marketed design systems like products? ​“In my time at Figma, I’ve talked to dozens of design systems teams looking to drive adoption and prove the value of their work. Now, more than ever, it’s important to think, strategize, and execute like a marketer. Here are some of the tactics and strategies for helping you position your design system as an integral asset — whether launching anew or revitalizing existing efforts.”

This April Fun Day, Figma had some fun with cursors. ​“What better way to celebrate this icon of interaction than with a look back at digital eras through the decades? For one week starting this April Fun Day, you’ll be able to choose throwback cursors inspired by four aesthetics from internet history: We’re calling them 8‑bit, Y2K, Skeuomorphic, and Aero. Here, we reminisce about bygone trends and reveal how we brought these vintages back to life.”