Tweets

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.”

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.

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.

Finally a solid improvement to detaching instances.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.)

Figma collaborated with Adobe on a video exploring some of the ideas for the post-acquisition future — Firefly in FigJam and Figma, linked assets between Figma and Creative Suit, multiplayer in Adobe apps, Figma prototypes + After Effects, shared design systems, and more. For more ideas, see threads from Noah Levin, Tom Lowry, Sho Kuwamoto, and Luis.

I’m a generalist and occasionally do different kinds of design work, so having a tighter integration between Figma and Adobe apps would be pretty neat. Adobe Fonts would be my #1, but I wish I could reuse a color palette and assets from Figma while working on my book layout in InDesign. While designing a photo-heavy website, I went back and forth between Figma and Lightroom experimenting with post-processing. The new Photoshop on the web also makes so much sense as a native integration. Count me in as a Figma × Adobe optimist.

Updated corner radius UI makes it easier to bind a variable to each individual corner.

A quick how-to video from Zander on creating a glowing animation inspired by the Disney logo. (And one more with a hover scale effect.)

Step 2: Learn from Vijay Verma how to create a cute animation using variables and conditions.

Ridd points out two common problems with UI kits (manual updates of shared attributes and maintaining multiple breakpoint variants) and shares a variable system to make your life way easier.

Great thread explaining the ​“weirdness” of OkLCH by one of the authors of the new Harmony color palette. Here is something I never thought about: ​“In electronic displays, yellow, cyan, and magenta are products of shining two lamps – subpixels. The more light is emitted, the brighter we perceive the color. It means the max lightness of the yellow is much higher than the blue’s.”

Karri Saarinen shares how their team is building one of the best-designed products out there: ​“The main point is that the design is only a reference, never any kind of deliverable itself, so the way it’s constructed doesn’t really matter.“ Don’t miss a follow-up on this approach and tech debt, as well as an older thread on their simple design system. Last but not least, his recent interview with Lenny Rachitsky on how Linear builds product was just fantastic (a good chunk is behind a paywall, but a podcast version is free.)

Great update to the OkColor plugin letting you specify both absolute and relative chroma in colors.