Tweets

I had to rewatch this tutorial by Double Glitch a few times and it still blows my mind. So cool!

A simple temperature prototype by Vijay Verma, made as a part of Figbruary.

Yet another fantastic tutorial by Double Glitch. The use of dodge & burn in animations is really smart and produces a beautiful effect.

Miggi shows how to use Figma sections for prototyping. Besides being a wonderful organizational tool, sections give you the ability to remember the states of areas of your prototype.

While Figma doesn’t have native support for color tokens yet, Luis kicks off a discussion of how they might work in the future. His approach is similar to how I usually organize color tokens in CSS, so hopefully that will be the direction they take!

Examples of fun prompts and highlights from the Figma design team warmups in FigJam: ​“Overall, we ask a question, put a generous amount of time on the clock with some tunes, and let folks explore and have fun in FigJam. You don’t need to over-engineer an icebreaker for it to feel meaningful! And letting the room react and respond really lightens the exercise.”

A preview of a new Figma plugin that offers Paper-like paint mixing. That demo brought so many memories! Paper used to be my go-to drawing app on the iPad a decade ago. Love to see some of its smart UI elements getting a second life as Figma plugins.

Figbruary submissions keep delivering gems! Double Glitch shows the behind-the-scenes process of making a cool animated light switch.

Sanbron Liong recorded his process of creating a photo-realistic drawing of Galaxy S23 Ultra lenses. See also his experiments with light effect and placement for it.

Jess starts a productive discussion on organizing files in Figma by asking about having one file per feature where iterations/​updates happen and another file for all ​“done” work. That’s similar to how I organize my work projects, but in reality, bringing work back to the ​“single source of truth” file or abstracting it to the design system is always hard to prioritize.

Molly Hellmuth explains how to build the perfect combo button that contains two actions in one component, each with independent states and resizing behaviors. This button allows designers to combine related actions, saving space and simplifying designs.

Designer Advocate Ana Boyer with great recommendations for reducing noodles, creating micro-interactions, and organizing separate designs into flows.

Seems like support for min/​max width and height are coming to the Auto Layout! Previous leaks by Nima Owji included support for variable fonts and text baseline alignment, so the chance that this is really coming is pretty good!

Seems like Figma reversed the original policy prohibiting third-party payment tools and delayed the launch of the paid resources in the Community until March 7th. While I believe Figma’s 15% fee for covering transactional costs and acting as the merchant of record is very fair, I applaud their flexibility and openness to community feedback. (Historically, Gumroad was one of the most popular platforms for selling digital products, but with their recent price increase I don’t know why would anyone go with them instead of a built-in community marketplace.)

Four new fonts in FigJam to convey just the right message or feeling. ​“Simple” is a new standard font for long-form text and easy scanning. ​“Bookish” is a serif font that adds a touch of formality to headers and quotes. ​“Technical” is a fixed-width font that mimics the look and feel of code. ​“Scribbled” is a script-based font that’s perfect for comments and annotations. All fonts were custom-made for FigJam by OH no Type Co and come with lots of beautiful details and juicy ligatures (have you seen the exclamation marks?!)

This is one of the FigJam brand updates that Figma has been working on since last year and just started to roll out. Make sure to check out this Twitter thread by Damien Correll, Creative Director at Figma.

Well, now we all know how to refer to the Auto Layout alignment control.

Essential list for any card-carrying Figma professional.

Dan Hollick with a great thread on light and dark modes, perceived contrast, APCA, and why we tend to tint dark backgrounds blue.

Pretty cool tutorial and community file on creating custom animated blobs without any plugins. A really smart technique combining blur with classic dodge & burn!

Epic thread by Molly Hellmuth on the best practices for using property, variant, and Auto Layout features. She just rebuilt her popular UI Prep design system with the latest Figma features and learned a lot in the process.