Tweets

Creating Light Rays

A quick tutorial on creating light rays inspired by Rogie and Vijay with the Noise & Texture plugin.

Generating designs with AI

Teddy Ni, a co-founder of Magic Patterns backed by Y Combinator, shares an experiment: “We taught an AI some Figma designs of a documentation site. It can now generate similar sites using my own custom components on ANY topic I want, ALL within Figma I can also click on any frame and request updates 🤯”. (This reminds me of the feature in Visual Copilot that I wrote about in #136.)

Figma Wrapped 2023

If only Figma was doing a Wrapped report at the end of the year…

New Community pages layout

Nice update to the Community resource pages — a new image gallery, plugin videos, and picking a relevant category to better showcase what kind of resource it is and what it can do. Also, remixes can no longer be published as they were misleading when it came to the authorship of the original resources.

Page dividers in Figma

A prototype of what page dividers in Figma might look like — considering this tweet’s engagement, it’s clearly something many of us would love to see!

“Rogie button”

At this point, Vijay is just showing off. Awesome iteration on an earlier shaders experiment by Rogie.

Steve Jobs design crits

OMG! Figma window is streamed to GPT-4 Vision, which then provides feedback on the fly narrated in the voice of Steve Jobs. Looking for a way to make this a part of our design crits.

Build It widget

Jordan Singer came up with another wild AI experiment — sketch or design anything in Figma or FigJam and turn it into a functional prototype with one click of a button. This demo is a great example — it built all the functionality correctly based just on a few text labels!

Walkman

I missed Vijay’s Figma recreations! A great illustration of the Sony Walkman, full of little details and textures. “Most of the shapes are created using primitive shapes with shadows and blend modes.”

Selecting objects below your cursor

The good thing about evergreen tips is, well, that they do not get old — I keep forgetting about this one! Right-click while holding the Control key to see a list of objects below your cursor.

Boolean variables

Christine Vallaure explains how to use boolean variables and modes to reduce the number of necessary components. One important caveat: “I would always recommend adding a documentation sheet to avoid confusion as per default, only the first mode will be displayed, and in development mode, hidden elements are not highlighted.” See also a second thread on using variables to trigger actions in prototypes once a specific threshold is reached.

Detaching instances

Finally a solid improvement to detaching instances.

Simple and focused plugins

Some great recommendations for quality unitasker plugins in Fons Mans’s comments.

Fun buttons

Rogie with a mini-tutorial on making Mario Kart-inspired resizable buttons with fun shapes.

Organizing project files and pages

Lee Munroe shares some ideas on using file templates to organize pages for projects in Figma.

Remove image background

I dig this tip from Zander — sometimes we already have the right tools without plugins.

Relative line height

Christine Vallaure with timeless advice of using percentages instead of pixels for specifying line height in Figma. There are very few cases when pixels make sense, and more often than not they cause inconvenience.

Drag a selection

Whoa, I didn’t know that selections can be moved! Great for getting to the tricky areas.

Tokens and variables Q&A

Designer Advocate Ana Boyer shares some common questions, answers, and resources that she came across when learning about design systems, tokens, and variables.

Variables for theming

Designer Advocate Anthony DiSpezio recommends the best approach for defining variables for theming: primitive variable → semantic variable → semantic style. The core advice is to keep using styles: “Styles represent a group of properties that should be applied to a layer or part of a layer. Variables represent individual values within that style.”

(Years ago, I noticed that when Apple announces a change at WWDC it’s better to go with it even if it doesn’t make sense at the moment — they see the roadmap much further. I wonder if it’s the same case with Figma and styles. At the moment they often feel redundant, but Figma made it very clear that they’re not going anywhere — hopefully something will make it clear soon why it was worth keeping them around.)

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