Tweets

Ridd goes deeper into one of the topics they’ve covered with Molly and suggests questions to ask yourself before committing to a new Figma feature or workflow. One common theme in all three of his ​“regrets” is complexity — just like in code, it can be considered a detectable ​“smell”.

Molly spotted a nice improvement to opening a plugin from the Community — now they can be opened in a recent file instead of creating a new empty file in Drafts.

An interesting take from Jacob, a co-founder of Pierre — one of the dev tools I’m most curious about. ​“Figma is where I go to approximate a finished product. World-class Product teams collaborate here on rough sketches with components built to track their perfectly engineered counterparts. […] Instead would love to see Figma start building their creative suite. Specifically, imagine a Figma engineering tool? Built from the ground up? With the same Figma principles? And built to be interoperable with their design tool…”

Loved Tom Lowry’s thoughts on designer-developer collaboration in this thread. I think most teams agree that the traditional process of throwing designs over the wall to engineers is broken and we need better tools, but I’m also cautiously skeptical of designers working directly with the source within the design tools. While this is already possible for marketing websites (hello, Webflow and Framer!), products and design systems bring a whole new level of complexity and challenges. This iteration of the Dev Mode seems like a first step in the right direction to me, but the road ahead is lengthy but bright.

It all started with Rahul Chakraborty’s question about a particular illustration technique used by Sketch in their blog. Two days later, Isaac Miller built the Extrusion Effect web app to generate cool extruded illustrations, and Anvesh Dunna turned this technique into a Figma plugin — hopefully, it will be available in the Community later this week. That’s why I love the design community!

A super detailed illustration with complex lighting and textures by Mark Bennett.

Chad shows how to use variables to change your variants on nested component instances when setting a mode.

A few less-known and undervalued tips from Mal on working with comments in Figma. Personally, I had no idea that comments can be added to a selection or can contain images! I’d also suggest enabling the ​“Only current page” filter to keep a list focused.

A cool technique of using randomizer plugins like Random Swap Variants and Variants Randomizer to generate a set of unique illustrations from predefined components.

Using variables to create a night and day version of the same illustration. Love this approach!

Molly Hellmuth suggests building small design habits in a new year that will make future you grateful — sticking to one naming format, avoiding groups, adding thumbnails to files, naming all your layers (good luck!), and unifying the name of your icon shapes.

Ridd recommends including little nav menus in high-fidelity prototypes so that viewers can easily inspect the different states of a page. Great advice and something I’m going to introduce to my prototypes!

Miggi celebrates his 3rd anniversary at Figma (congratulations!) by demonstrating how to make a color wheel. (A coincidence, but just earlier this week I was making the same color wheel with a very similar technique!)

A cool tutorial on creating an animated card background using Rogie​’s popular Noise & Texture plugin — fast-forward to the end to see the final result.

Fascinating side-by-side comparison of Midjourney 5.2 and the newly released version 6. The generative art from Midjourney has always felt more realistic and interesting compared to other services, and now the gap appears even larger.

John LePore is ​“designing the future” through his work on futuristic interfaces for films, video games, and the automotive industry, including the Hummer EV. He offers his own take on the recently announced Porsche’s bespoke interface for Apple CarPlay. Great presentation and deep thinking behind his choices.

Fons Mans explains how to create an image fade effect in Figma.

Double Glitch reproduced in Figma a cool (or should I say ​“frozen”? Sorry!) effect first created by Marcus Eckert for the Riveo app. This cursor-tracking prototyping technique is getting wild!

How to preserve a button’s volume across multiple themes? Ridd suggests combining brand variables with a style wrapper for reusing gradients.

Molly Hellmuth recommends dividing design system assets into four files for increased flexibility and improved performance. These include Foundations, Icons, Components, and a separate design file with ​“local” assets.