Tweets

Developer Advocate Jake and Designer Advocate Lauren have an insightful conversation about strengthening relationships between designers and developers. I love Jake’s point that trust is essential and we don’t need to understand every part of each other’s work to collaborate effectively. (Let’s hope Figma Detached is a new series, as I want more!)

So many great ways to warm up the room in replies to Femke. I’d love to try This or That, play two truths and a lie, draw blind contour portraits, or look for common ground with my team.

I love seeing how teams improve their workflows with internal Figma plugins. Here, Bryan Berger from Discord built a handy plugin to randomize avatar fills from their design system library. The source code is available on GitHub. (I guess something is in the air, as Miguel Solorio is building something similar for his specific use case.)

Tru Narla, Software Engineer at Discord, shares some quality tips on using Figma as a developer — Inspect panel, copying code snippets, and exporting full-sized assets.

Luis with a cool technique for adding focus rings to a button using an absolutely positioned component instead of a shadow hack.

Molly Hellmuth shares the top 10 places where her students get stuck when building their first design system in Figma. Many of those involve tactics that once were considered best practices but got depreciated by newer features and approaches. Her answers to the tricky questions come from a ton of knowledge and experience.

Every time someone posts pictures of Figma’s SF office, I’m blown away by its beauty and creativity.

Discord designer Daniel Destefanis built an internal plugin for generating entire conversations using ChatGTP and rendering them using their design system. This is an excellent example of automating a mundane part of day-to-day work with AI.

Is this an important update? No. But is it fun? Hell yes! The FigJam team keeps delivering the most delight per buck.

While I don’t often prototype interactions, I love the demo of all the use cases in this thread by Ana Boyer! Engineer Jediah Katz is also dropping some tips and tricks and Zander Whitehurst made a cool demo. Don’t miss the sticky scrolling playground file as well.

I hope this is the first step to batching all comments into a daily digest for lower-priority files 🤞

Nice! Markdown FTW.

Now you can align layers with layers inside a component instance. Check out the thread by Tom Lowry and don’t miss his detailed spec for different scenarios!

Component properties v2 are out of beta with the ability to bubble up and expose properties of nested instances. It’s also now possible to define a list of preferred instances for swapping. Great for selecting a subset of a larger icons library or working with card components.

Honestly, I always assumed that SVG bugs are just a part of the game and will always be here — not a surprising conclusion when 49% of imported SVGs relied on buggy features. In retrospect, it was a silly assumption considering SVG is one of only a few open vector formats. In this fantastic thread, Figma engineer Lauren Budorick shows how much work went into detecting, analyzing, and fixing these bugs. I didn’t realize that luminance mask support was a part of this work as well, and Miggi is already exploring creative applications for composited motion visuals in prototypes.

“You can now more confidently approve library updates with a visual preview of the changes and the ability to apply them to individual instances and layers.” I don’t even know how I’ve dealt with the stress of accepting library changes sight unseen in the past.

While color and layer blend modes have the most noticeable previews, this update is a part of the larger initiative for adding previews to all settings. Previews were already added to Effects, and the team is considering supporting boolean ops, component props, and the font picker.

My guess is we’ll see hanging punctuation in the wild more often now. (Good luck, developers.)

The timing of this release is impeccable — just a couple of months ago WebKit added support for leading-trim CSS property to Safari Technology Preview (although other browsers are not rushing). For a deeper dive into why it’s important, see Leading-Trim: The Future of Digital Typesetting by Ethan Wang from Microsoft.

This way to monitor the use of system resources was around for a while, but it’s a nice reminder to check it if you’re working on a huge design file or a massive library.