Tweets

Happy birthday to my favorite design tool!

Quality-of-life improvement in FigJam — regardless of connector and shape styling, they will always have the same optical spacing. Also, alignment indicators now appear only when needed and are hidden when the object is being moved across the board. So much cleaner!

There are three simple ingredients of a realistic illustration: gradients, shadows, and noise. Vijay makes it look so easy!

This is a very solid list. My top picks would be independent strokes (#1), OkLCH color support (#7), and scroll-based interactivity (#3) — these have to be ​“native” features. Cleaning unnecessary colors (#2) and archiving frames (#9) can be achieved with plugins, but it’s hard to remember to run them. Collapsing layers (#10) is easy enough with an Option-L shortcut, and assigning designers to specific screens (#8) is relevant only to some teams’ workflow. 

(I have one more feature to add to the list. As I was working on a fairly complicated animation recently, I couldn’t believe variables still didn’t have a built-in debugger. They change based on various interactions and conditions, but there is no visibility into the state or triggers, making it very hard to build and debug.) 

We can’t be friends if you do not react to a new Figma drop in the same way.

Joel Miller, one of the product designers behind UI3 at Figma, walks us through improvements the team is making based on the user feedback: Clip Content is a checkbox again, constraints are more efficient to use, pixel values are brought back to the resize controls in Auto Layout, more actions are shown for a layer, library information added for components, frame orientation controls are back, and blend modes improved. Kudos to the team for listening to the community!

Miggi explains how to control the behavior of text fields with visual and keyboard shortcuts without touching the auto width/​height or fixed size controls in the Design panel.

Tyler created a short tutorial on making a realistic light beam using simple shapes, a blend mode, and a blur.

This is a topic near and dear to my heart. Ana discusses the benefits of using color scales — consistency, accessibility, and efficiency.

Ana Boyer on creating a component API — a process of defining how you will approach constructing and naming your components across all of your libraries and documentation that will be consumed by your design and engineering teams.

The last of the ten newly announced features — hide slides to skip them!

Speaking of design conferences, the GitHub Design team recently held its second internal design conference, LGTM. You can watch talks from last year in the YouTube playlist, but a couple of this year’s talks have already been published as well — ​“Who is the We in the How Might We” on building trust and ​“Async/​Await” on close collaboration across non-overlapping time zones.

Day 9 brings new slick transition controls to customize the duration, easing curve, delay, etc.

Day 8. Improved language support in the Tone Dial.

Day 7 drop makes it possible to add all the slides into the deck with no need to choose right away.

Day 6 of new releases with an addition of rulers to Slides.

Miggi applies the new ​“Remove background” AI feature, a vector mask outlining the shape, a hidden ​“Show mask outlines” command (that I didn’t know about!), and a simple prototype to create a popping out head avatar.

A 7‑minute tutorial from Miggi on using the new Suggest Auto Layout and the AI features ​“Rewrite this,” ​“Replace content,” and ​“Rename layers.” 

Luis on the power of efficient aliasing when building typographic styles from primitives.

Minimize or hide the new UI to regain more screen real estate as you work.