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10+ new features and integrations in FigJam

A big update to FigJam — custom templates for your team, stamp your teammates’ faces to files and tag them with @mentions, emoji picker opens by typing a colon (“:”), custom color palettes (coming soon), UserTesting and Great Question integrations, Productboard widget, and new tunes! Also, explore new world-class teams’ templates and see a thread by Cai on the Figma design team’s rituals and templates they use in daily work.

How plugins work

Fascinating comments from Sho Kuwamoto, Figma’s VP of Product, on how plugins are implemented. Each plugin runs in a security sandbox — ​“We actually took a JavaScript VM, compiled it down to WebAssembly, and then we run that VM inside of the browser. So it’s a completely separate engine than the native JS engine. For security reasons, we don’t want two scripts running inside that VM, because then the two scripts could potentially have access to each other. And we don’t want to run two instances of this VM, for memory reasons.” 🤯

Automator use cases

Great examples of automating grunt work with the Automator plugin.

Nudge, Zoom, and Slice tool

Molly with 3 good tips. I have to admit that Slice is the dustiest tool in my toolbar.

10 Figma hacks that designers need to know

Great list of Figma tips from the ADPList.

Mirrored components

A simple but fun technique for creating cool animations with mirrored components.

Liquid mesh gradients

Cool technique from Nitish Khagwal for creating animated liquid mesh gradients.

A glowing glass effect

Fons Mans is back with a new tutorial on how to create a glowing glass effect in Figma.

Ignore Auto Layout when dragging

Hold the Spacebar when moving an object to ignore Auto Layout.

Double-clicking layer icons

MDS with a great shortcut of double-clicking on a layer icon to zoom into selection.

Color-coding components

A good tip from Jan Toman on color-coding different types of components inside a Figma library, which allows everyone to identify the component’s source and set the right expectations from these components.

Debugging & refactoring a variant component

On a similar note, this thread by Luis is a great walkthrough of debugging, reducing complexity, and refactoring a tricky variant component. The core part of his approach is slicing everything up into composable parts.

The designer advocates team

Regardless of going to the in-person Config this summer, this is a great intro of the international designer advocate team. Here is the full list for you to follow — Lauren Andres, Hugo Raymond, Hiroki Tani, Julia Kestner, Mallory Dean, Corey Lee, Alexia Danton, and Sebastian Metel.

Glowing loader

A really cool glowing effect made by Samarth Jajodia, likely with a combination of the blur effect and color blend modes. Check out his other experiments as well.

Emojis in the prop names

Luis with a nifty list of suggested emojis to indicate different kinds of component properties.

Sunset Drive

Cool animation by Double Glitch using a smart technique from Vijay Verma (see Figma file).

Using sections for component documentation

Sections are great for organizing components, documenting states, grouping elements in external embeds, and better visibility of component and frame names.

Creator Micro and iPad

That Creator Micro keyboard and FigJam on iPad combo is pretty slick.

Speaking at Config 2023

I didn’t realize how competitive the speaker selection is at Config 2023. This year the Figma team received over 950 session proposals, and during previous years they’ve had enough time for only about 25.

Quick replies in the mobile app

Amazing intro video of the 5x faster comment replies in the updated mobile apps. See also the comparison of performance before and after this release.

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