Tweets

Mike Bespalov is cooking something dope. The glass effect is very cool, but I love the displacement effect applied to the text even more. The plugin is not out yet, but it’s coming soon — can’t wait to try it out!

Brett from Designjoy shows how to achieve a cool visual effect with a Progressive Blur plugin.

Adrian prepared a short tutorial on how to set up Figma for mobile design using the right frame sizes, grids, Auto Layout, constraints, and system components.

Brilliant tip from Molly Hellmuth — create a special text style for labels where line height aligns to your grid. No matter what variable is used for padding, the height of your UI elements will be a multiple of the base grid. (This is also a nice way to keep your labels aligned with icons.)

Loren Baxter shares at Sneak Peek how to use Figma variables to design a dynamically colored UI for light and dark modes.

So much polish has been added to FigJam in the last few weeks! Now, you can change the color of connectors and their text independently.

Highly realistic illustration, made entirely in Figma by Fabian Albert.

Molly Hellmuth shares daily discoveries while working on the UI Prep design system update. There are great tips on pairing heading and body sizes, clearly marking a default text size, avoiding hiding components with a period or underline in the name, scoping variables in bulk, establishing a set of ​“surface” colors, removing a focused state, and including a special data text style for tables.

Small improvements to FigJam keep coming — now connectors can connect to the edge or arbitrary spots on an object, not just the NSEW cardinal directions.

Nathan A Curtis maintained ~2,000 slides worth of workshops and talks in Figma for four years, so his feedback on Figma Slides is worth listening to. His biggest complaint is a lack of templates and styles on the Professional plan, but in the replies Slides PM Mihika Kapoor confirmed that Pro templates are coming soon.

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.