The new Figma homepage, this time designed with a custom Figma Sans typeface. (I truly hope this redesign was codenamed “Figma sans Whyte” internally.)
I got curious about how the Figma brand and messaging changed over the years and went down the rabbit hole of the Wayback Machine. The first available version is from December 2015 — “The Collaborative Interface Design Tool.” A year later, it was changed to “The first interface design tool with real-time collaboration,” which feels like something Rasmus Andersson would design. It was updated to the “Turn Ideas into Products Faster” in April 2017, which was slightly tweaked later that year. The homepage was redesigned again in January 2019 to “A better way to design.”
Finally, one of my favorite versions using ABC Whyte typeface and “Where teams design together” tagline was launched in October of 2019 and stayed pretty much unchanged until April of 2021 when it was replaced with a mouthful “Minds meeting minds is how great ideas meet the world.” This one didn’t stay for too long and gave way to a great tagline, “Nothing great is made alone,” in July 2021, which was used for two years until July of 2023, when it was replaced with a more descriptive “How you design, align, and build matters. Do it together with Figma.” That was the version that the new homepage replaced.
Roughly 20% of the population has dyslexia. The Letter Checker by Stark helps you pick fonts that are more likely to work for those people.
The beautifully made radio control panel by Yang You, inspired by the Art of Noise exhibit at the SFMOMA. (I also visited it after the second day of Config, and seeing these cult objects by Dieter Rams and teenage engineering in person was a remarkable experience.)
Femke made a template for the presentation deck as an overview of your next design project.
Daniel Destefanis and Soundharya Muthukrishnan: “Here’s a simple presentation template to share designs with your collaborators or clients and get alignment.”
A base UI kit from Advocates Luis and Jake is available in the Figma assets panel by default. It’s backed with a fully Code Connected React codebase. See Luis’ thread on how and why it was made.
“Now in Dev Mode, new statuses like Edited and Completed make it easier to communicate what’s changed and ready — supporting a more fluid development process.”
Config playlist from Damien Correll.
With 87 talks and 36 hours of content, you’ll need a solid plan and structure to watch the sessions. Even conference attendees watched no more than 20% of the talks and have some catching up to do. I prepared a FigJam file with all videos from Config 2024 organized chronologically by the conference track — Design Systems, Innovation, Design/Craft, Building Products, and Leadership Collective.
Use it as a template to mark what you plan to watch or have already watched with stamps. Add your thoughts with sticky notes. Share your version of the file with recommendations and comments with friends or coworkers. Please help others catch up with all the great sessions from Config 2024 by sharing and liking this resource.
A new project by Gavin McFarland makes creating and bundling Figma plugins easier. “Plugma uses Vite to bundle Figma plugins and is configured to inline all styles and scripts into one file. It uses a local server for development, that passes messages from Figma’s main thread to the local server using web sockets.”
Gavin Nelson made a beautiful alternative icon for the desktop Figma app.
A new free resource by Fons Mans.
Essential Figma shortcuts as A4 and A3 posters, via Nick Babich.
A nicely organized UI kit for an open-source platform for commerce.
Christine Vallaure made a responsive and modular type scale using a scaling ratio approach.
A collection of attractive geometric backgrounds, “generated by Human with AI”. Available for free for personal, studio, and commercial use.
Official map symbols and patterns used by the National Park Service. NPS symbols are free and in the public domain. They derive from the Ultimate Symbol Collection, a commercial product that offers hundreds of additional symbols.
A useful Figma community file if you want to map out the layout before setting it up.
This “official” preset comes pre-installed on the Figma Creator Micro.
An impressive website prototype for The French Tototte is made by Basti Ui using animations, videos, and 3D. Make sure to check it out in the prototype mode.