Tweets

Creating beautiful gradients in Figma just got easier! New controls for flipping and rotating gradients (see why they’re separate controls), displaying the gradient stop position in percentage (another yay from me!), and even better-looking defaults (although they’re bringing back the old behavior if you add a gradient on top of another fill).

Beautiful illustration by Pawel Olek. Ridd is spot on — we’re entering the ​“circuitry era of web design”.

Beautiful illustration of a Brain turntable made in Figma.

Some colors have established semantic uses — green for positive feedback, red for errors, and yellow for warnings. But what happens if your brand is based on one of them? Molly looks at how Netflix & Lego, Spotify & Quickbooks, and Hertz & McDonald’s handle this challenge. Her takeaway: either embrace the situation and use the brand color for semantic values, or introduce a new distinct color shade (i.e. orange for errors), but do not use two similar colors for different needs.

Anthony DiSpezio shows how merge reviews now ignore top-level sections, allowing you to review changes at the frame or component level.

James walks through his process of creating small animated illustrations for the new Clerk website.

Molly suggests it’s time to support multiple icon sizes with number variables.

Beautiful kick-off of the Figbruary by Vijay. See more by hashtag #figbruary on Twitter/​X.

Fons Mans shows how to create a simple glow effect inspired by Vision Pro promo at the Apple 5th Avenue store in New York.

Molly praises the Cmd+\ shortcut for showing/​hiding UI, and I want to expand her tip by adding that the Cmd+Shift+\ shortcut toggles only the left sidebar (Layers/​Assets). Keep in mind that Cmd+\ also works in the Present mode — Figma toolbar has been popping up and blocking the navigation in one of my prototypes, so discovering that it could be turned off was a big relief.

In case you said goodbye to Dev Mode last week, Molly Hellmuth recommends a few plugins to help fill in the gap — Annotate It, Print Variables, Frame History, EightShapes Specs, and Handoff Notes.

I’ve seen a lot of confusion over the removal of the Inspect panel and the introduction of Dev Mode, so happy to see a detailed walkthrough of the free viewer experience recorded by Tom Lowry. Pretty much everything from the old Inspect panel is still available for free, and Dev Mode builds on top of that foundation. While some will inevitably label Dev Mode as a ​“money grab”, I won’t be surprised if many teams will save money by converting full Design seats to standalone Dev Mode seats.

Lilit explains some ups and downs of using Figma with Vision Pro. Sounds like it’s busted in Safari for now, but inside Mac Virtual Display it works pretty well.

Fantastic artwork made by Walid Beno in Figma.

Cool prototyping technique built on variables.

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!