Resources

…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.)

Great collection of UI elements and patterns organized by the function like login, empty state, wizard, etc. A great resource for gathering ideas and analyzing the best practices.

Flowbite Icons is a collection of 437 free and open-source SVG icons built for the Flowbite Ecosystem.

Library with all colors from Radix Colors, an open-source color system for designing beautiful, accessible websites and apps. Also made by Jan using variables and light/​dark modes.

Jan Toman made an unofficial Figma library of variables and styles that use the default Tailwind CSS configuration.

Double Glitch made the Space Invaders game and turned Figma into a game engine.

Realistic typing is finally possible in Figma prototypes using variables.

While Will was working on Figma-OS, Willy Wu from Figma was also building his own version with a Figma plugin to help compile small C programs using ELVM. Don’t miss a thread on his journey.

Occasionally someone builds something in Figma that just melts my brain: ​“Figma-OS is the first Turing-complete 8‑bit computer built using Figma prototyping tools. Figma-OS has state-of-the-art specs with 512 bits of RAM, 16 bytes program memory, 10 Hz clock speed, and a MISC instruction set of 16 OPCODEs.” See the thread from Will DePue on how it works.

It almost feels like FigJam with its endless board was made for large spatial recaps like this! Great idea and a fun format made by Juarez Filho.

“Apple’s initial visionOS design kit for Figma contains a comprehensive set of UI components, views, system interfaces, text styles, color styles, and materials. All of the core ingredients you need to quickly create highly realistic visionOS app designs.” See also Designing for visionOS at Apple Design Resources.

With the latest round of auto layout updates, learn how you can wrap objects to a new line, set minimum and maximum widths and heights, and truncate text based on a set number of lines.