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Figma SF office

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

Magic Messages

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.

Haptics on the desktop app (Mac)

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

Sticky scrolling in prototyping

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.

Batched comment notification emails

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

Rich text in comments

Nice! Markdown FTW.

Align to nested instances

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 props v2

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.

SVG import bug fixes

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.

Library update improvements

“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.

On-canvas previews

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.

Hanging punctuation

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

Leading trim

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.

Resource Use

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.

Gradient position values

The lack of precision in the gradient tool is an old annoyance, but as this tweet grew in popularity I’ve been quietly hoping that maybe the fix would make it to the Little Big Updates. Regardless, the replies provide a ton of smart workaround — distributing stops through double-clicking, nudging stops, using the Precise Gradients plugin, and even looking in the Inspect tab!

Building AI design tools with GPT-4

Jordan Singer shares what Diagram learned from participating in OpenAI Converge with early access to GPT‑4 and how they’re using it in Magician and Genius plugins.

Poster tutorial

Fons Mans is back with a colorful poster tutorial.

Figbruary experiments

Vijay Verma wraps up his Figbruary challenge with a full list of 28 experiments he made last month. 

Managing Figma styles

Luis keeps digging into different ways of structuring Figma libraries and styles. In this thread, he thinks through naming conventions on styles and explores the pros and cons of more abstract and specific naming conventions.

Font x-height and legibility

Dan Hollick with a fascinating thread on an optimal x‑height size and a visual arc.

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