Resources

Meta released official UI components and resources for designing immersive experiences.

Mihika Kapoor and Yuhki Yamashita gave a talk at the Lenny and Friends Summit on doing product reviews the right way. While I look forward to watching the full video when it’s available, the slides are pretty comprehensive. They point out that the main goal of product reviews is not making decisions but winning trust.

At a recent meetup, Developer Advocate Jake Albaugh shared the story of Figma’s SDS, a UI kit with a realistic code backing to help bridge the gap between design and development. As a reminder, the Simple Design System is available in the Libraries selector, Figma community, and GitHub.

Impressive lightsaber loader effect by Vijay.

Luis has been working on his version of the kit for over a month, and now it’s finally available in the Figma community. Even includes a new Sidebar component that was released last Friday!

After the Figma library recommended by shadcn wasn’t updated in 2 years, I love all the new resources popping up! Yauheni created a free and open-source Figma library for the shadcn/​ui component and documented his process on X.

James McDonald shared a design file of his recent project with a few cool effects.

What a brilliant idea. If you have completed design projects but never can find time to prepare case studies or publish work on social media, this service does this for you. You share a Figma file, and they refine, rework, and turn your project into ready-to-share assets for a one-time fee.

A collection of UX methods, templates, and activities for product ideation, mapping, and concept testing sessions. See also the entire catalog of resources on the website.

This website does a great public service by classifying dark UI patterns, pointing to relevant international laws, and publicly shaming the biggest offenders: ​“Deceptive patterns (also known as ​“dark patterns”) are tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn’t mean to, like buying or signing up for something. […] We’ve collected over 400 examples in our hall of shame. The most commonly complained about companies are Google, Facebook, Amazon and LinkedIn.”

There are plenty of icon sets out there, but this one includes 3,198 free SVG icons for popular brands, which is pretty uncommon.

For those of us missing the good old days of iOS 6 and Corinthian leather: ​“Relive the golden era of skeuomorphic design with the Legacy iOS UI Kit.”

A new library of 514 modern handcrafted icons is available in two visual styles.

Shu Ha Ri is a robust design system meticulously crafted for Figma, offering many essential features and a generous free version. It revolves around modularity and empowers designers to efficiently create diverse instances with a single master component.

Apple updated their iOS 18 UI kit to include iPhone 16 Pro bezels (in all colors), updated templates to match new display dimensions, and several other bug fixes and improvements.

“Show Them” is a new course on landing page optimization by Rob Hope. He hosts one of my favorite design podcasts and curates an inspirational collection of single-page websites at One Page Love. Rob spent years analyzing landing pages, so when he shares knowledge, I’m listening! To see what his content is like, check out the bonus video on Social Proof.

The course is launching on November 19th and offers a generous 70% discount until September 18th, which I immediately took advantage of. (Not affiliated, just love Rob’s work.)

A collection of fun interactions made by Nitish Khagwal.

For a recent project at work, I reviewed popular UI libraries, and it was clear that shadcn/​ui is one of the most comprehensive, customizable, and common choices. I had only a few concerns, one being a lack of a modern Figma library companion — the community file hadn’t been updated in 2 years, didn’t support variables or customization, and missed new components and properties.

I braced myself to spend a week recreating all components in Figma from scratch when Matt Wierzbicki announced his commercial Figma library of shadcn/​ui components. Matt spent years developing Ant Design System, so he is not new to projects of this scale. We licensed the library for our team, and so far, it seems to be very well-made and highly customizable. The product is very new and doesn’t even have a website yet, but it came out at such a perfect moment for me that I still want to shout it out.

Speaking of new typefaces, I’ve been enjoying a highly versatile Innovator Grotesk lately. Unlike some of the traditional typefaces from the print era, this one is made with UI design in mind — its well-balanced vertical metrics make it a breeze to center text vertically inside elements or next to icons. It works well as a drop-in replacement for Inter or San Francisco, and I like a slightly wider width and less ubiquitous look. Highly recommend checking out its beautiful specimens and a simple license.

Delighted to see the internal name sneaking into a shortcut for creating a new Slides deck! BTW, both figjam.new and figma.new have also been around for a while.