Articles

Some of the industry’s best designers answer the question ​“What book should designers read and why?” I only managed to read six of these so far, but a bunch of them have been sitting in my queue for a while. Great project by Vincent van der Meulen.

Rafal Tomal wrote a simple guide for non-designers like content creators, copywriters, marketers, and others who want to be able to create quick graphics on their own without learning all the advanced Figma features: ​“At the end of this guide, you’ll know how to create your own file in Figma, set up the frame (the artboard for your image) at the size you need, add some text and images, and export it to PNG or JPG.”

A large profile of FigJam AI in Fast Company. ​“Figma’s AI ambitions are clear. Singer noted that ​‘we really do think of AI as playing a central role across the entirety of the platform.’ In theory, that could mean not just better meetings, but more capable coworkers. ​‘In a collaborative environment where you’re working with many people on a project,’ Singer says, ​‘AI really up-levels everyone.’”

In the second part of his monumental article, Luis covers ​“how to build adaptable, indexable, logical, and specific components as part of the FRAILS framework.” (The two-part series was strategically published before the Christmas break, giving you some extra time to read it.)

The Verge with some context on what exactly happened: ​“Last month, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) provisionally determined that the deal would harm the product design software market should it go ahead — effectively blocking the acquisition until Adobe addressed the regulator’s concerns, which involves the divestiture of ​‘overlapping operations’ like Figma Design and the company’s competing Adobe XD app. A response to the CMA’s request for remediations, dated December 14th, was published on the Authority’s website on Monday. In short, Adobe is refusing to make any of the suggested compromises to ease the CMA’s concerns, saying a divestment is ​‘wholly disproportionate.’ Adobe said in the statement that it disagrees with the CMA’s findings, and that ​‘no remedy package that preserves the benefits of the transaction will be sufficient to resolve the competition concerns.’”

The ​“compromise” suggested by CMA is pretty wild: ​“The CMA’s recommendations don’t leave Adobe much wriggle room: either Adobe has to sell off Figma Design — Figma’s main product offering and, likely, the biggest motivation behind Adobe’s merger bid — or the deal is blocked entirely.”

Dylan Field: ​“Figma and Adobe have reached a joint decision to end our pending acquisition. It’s not the outcome we had hoped for, but despite thousands of hours spent with regulators around the world detailing differences between our businesses, our products, and the markets we serve, we no longer see a path toward regulatory approval of the deal.”

A new long-read from Luis Ouriach published in the Smashing Magazine: ​“Design systems can be of immense help, but failure to adopt them invalidates the hard work that goes into building the thing in the first place! In this two-part series of articles, Luis shares his experience with design systems and how you can overcome the potential pitfalls, starting from how to make designers on your team adopt the complex and well-built system that you created to what are the best naming conventions and how to handle the auto-layout of components, indexing/​search, and more.”

In a follow-up to the above interview, Niko and Garrett share what it means to establish a ​“prototyping culture” in your company and why it matters. ​“Prototyping creates an interactive experience that brings the product to life, revealing interactions that might be overlooked in static designs. When integrated into the product development process early, it saves engineering time and streamlines workflows. Adopting a prototyping culture fosters innovation.”

The design systems app Supernova analyzed the responses from 100+ respondents to pull out trends and key takeaways about how designers and developers are using components. Some of the interesting takeaways — the majority of the respondents use the design tool (Figma!) as their source of truth instead of the documentation, test and validate design patterns by getting feedback from designers and developers on their team, and maintain their component library by documenting changes and version updates for all components.

As always, a fantastic annual report on the state of UX and our industry by the UX Collective: ​“Much like late-stage capitalism, late-stage UX is characterized by its market saturation, heavy focus on financial growth, commoditization, automation, and increased financialization. Corporations exert significant influence over the economy and society, and designers can only push so far when advocating for user needs. How can we navigate this landscape as designers in 2024?” 

Figma presents a 2023 Handoff, ​“a year-end celebration of the big plays and deep learnings we plan to carry into next season.” A beautiful collection of articles on diverse topics summing up this year — top 10 things the team shipped this year, what it takes to bring AI features to market, 36 questions to fall (back) in love with tech, a multiplayer guide to great meetings, a definition of what work looks and feels like right now, professional pivots, and the joy of mechanical keyboards.

“Rolling out to all Enterprise accounts over the next week, org admins can now sort users by cost center into a new container called billing groups. This allows them to track costs while using workspaces for content organization and collaboration. As part of this roll out, license management will transition from workspace admins to billing group admins. Workspace admins will no longer upgrade and downgrade users in their workspace or participate in true up.”

Sho Kuwamoto on variables and simplicity: ​“The obvious way to make things simpler is to remove things. Or maybe hide things. But one of the surprising aspects of simplicity is that sometimes, in order to make things feel more simple, you have to add more stuff.”

Jacob Miller, a Product Manager on the Design Systems team, unpacks the new features and answers questions about variables: ​“Our latest updates to variables in Figma allow for even more flexibility with updates to stroke weight, effects, layout grid, and layer opacity, along with nested instance variant binding. These upgrades not only boost design customization, they help align design and code like never before. Here, we share an overview of what we’re shipping with variables, how to use them in your current workflow, and where we’re going next with typography.”

Not mentioned in the article, but my favorite update is that now the variables authoring window can be resized! See also this thread by Luis, and Hugo’s accurate summary of the community’s reaction.

Congrats to Jordan Singer on making it to the Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list: ​“Product designer-turned-entrepreneur Jorgan Singer founded Diagram, a startup that created web-based design tools dubbed ​“Magician” and ​“Genius” that used AI and text-based prompts to generate design ideas and suggest design recommendations. Diagram quickly gained steam among its 100,000 users before being acquired by $20 billion design company Figma in 2023.” For more of his story, listen to the ​“Building Design Tools” episode of the Design is for Everyone Podcast and a long list of ideas that he has built since 2015.

UK is following in EU’s footsteps: ​“CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) provisionally finds Adobe’s deal to buy Figma would likely harm innovation for software used by the vast majority of UK digital designers.”

Not sure if the CMA truly understands what each of the apps is for: ​“The inquiry group has also provisionally found that Figma is a credible future competitor to Adobe in image editing and illustration software – and that the threat posed by Figma has driven product development in Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator applications, including new web versions. The inquiry group considers that if the deal went ahead, it would eliminate Figma as a competitor which would otherwise have continued to seek to develop its capabilities in image editing and illustration, thereby fuelling innovation and product development by Adobe.”

November 17th, 2023: ​“The European Commission has informed Adobe of its preliminary view that its proposed acquisition of Figma may reduce competition in the global markets for the supply of interactive product design software and of other creative design software.”

The Dev Mode team shares their early pivot away from a codegen-first approach, the acquisition of Visly that accelerated their efforts, and what it means to break down the handoff wall.

Financial Times: ​“Adobe’s $20bn deal to buy Figma is facing a fresh setback as regulators in Brussels prepare to file anti-competitive charges against the companies, an escalation that signals the EU believes the acquisition will harm rivals in the digital design market. […] A preliminary assessment of the deal already revealed a ​“substantial lessening of competition” in the UK. In the US, the Department of Justice is reportedly preparing a lawsuit to block the transaction. Adobe has already indicated it is ready to deal with probes as regulators intensify their scrutiny of large tech transactions.”

Evil Martians, the team behind the Polychrom plugin, shares lessons they learned while building it and how they incorporated traditional elements of computer science into their work, like algorithms, data structures, and tree traversal techniques.