Resources

The brand new kit with the evolution of Microsoft’s design system. Supports variables, theme switching, and uses memory more efficiently.

A new take on Little Big Updates from Figma — every Thursday this fall they’re releasing some of the 30+ updates designed to make day-to-day life a little easier. This week it’s four improvements to the Assets panel. #1 is filtering assets by a specific library file, recently viewed, default libraries, and more. #2 is larger and more visible thumbnails. #3 is showing component names by default, with variant counts on hover. #4 is my favorite — clicking on an asset opens up a new component modal that displays a larger preview and a link to the main component file, plus a component playground on the paid plans where you can preview and interact with any variants, variable modes, or component properties.

Keeybs is a customizable keycap and keyboard template library by Joanne Li, spawned out of a love for custom mechanical keyboards.

Blend Icons offer 137,000 free icons in more than 1,300 collections of 7 different styles.

A new free and open-source illustration collection from Pablo Stanley: ​“Transhumanism has always fascinated me. It’s a philosophical movement that challenges our understanding of human limitations and our potential to transcend them. It holds the belief that we can evolve beyond our current physical and mental restraints by integrating technology into our very being. It’s about pushing the boundaries of what it means to be human, embracing the fusion of biology and technology, and envisioning a future where we’re no longer constrained by our natural form.”

Lottielab is a new tool for creating and managing Lottie animations that won Product of the Day at ProductHunt this week. Images can be imported from Figma, SVGs, or Lottie files, and exported as Lottie, GIF, or MP4 to any platform. From Drew, a co-founder of Lottielab: ​“We are streamlining this cluttered process into a simple, seamleass, all-in-one workflow, with all the benefits of modern design tooling fit for today’s product development teams — being web-based, collaborative and easy to use — no After Effects knowledge needed.”

Luis updated Figma’s public UI2 design system file with all the features and elements introduced since its last update in 2019. His process is fascinating to follow and shows how much work went into this little update! Also has some great tips on plugins and the organization of a large design system.

Figr is a collection of editable UIs of popular apps that can be copied to Figma. ​“Figr is created to simplify design research and decision-making. It’s your one-stop solution for design inspiration, research, and editable files, freeing you to build great products.” Won the ​“2nd Product of the Day” at ProductHunt on August 3rd.

Vijay recreated a Fujifilm X100V camera using mostly primitive shapes with shadows and gradients. As a Fuji shooter since the days of X‑T1, I love seeing his attention to detail in this illustration! See this thread for his tips on creating a metal pattern and a camera texture.

Amazing animated illustration of a typewriter by Samarth Jajodia.

Ridd shares a free annotation components library to help designers communicate more effectively and nail down the handoff process. Comes with a video lesson on organizing Figma files using the helpers library.

…and one more list, but for advanced prototyping!

Designer Advocate Mallory mapped out a helpful list of resources like YouTube videos, playgrounds, community files, plugins, and articles to get started with Variables.

Sawyer Hood, Software Engineer at Figma, built a plugin template that demonstrates streaming LLM responses inside of a plugin to get you up and running with the next AI project.

Sam Gordashko collected resources on variables and advanced prototyping for the Design System University community, based on topics designers often struggle with.

Luis Ouriach with an introduction to variables and a primer on how to structure your variable collections for single and multi-brand systems.

Three different methods of building an interactive Tab Group with variables, presented with their pros and cons.

A game of jeopardy powered by Figma variables! Change all the questions and answers with variables and play a custom game with your team. Made by Elizabeth Lin.

As always, Double Glitch is pushing the limits of Figma prototypes — this time by rendering a rectangular cuboid in 3D using variables and advanced prototyping. See his demo on Twitter and thoughts on the intricacies of this project.

Figma, but for architects: ​“Arcol is a design and documentation tool that helps AEC teams create better buildings, faster.” Backed by Dylan Field as one of the investors. (Hat tip to Jon Moore.)