Tweets

Gavin McFarland on four things he misses in the UI3 from the old version — rulers, scrollbars, distinct areas for the main controls, and easier-to-read notifications.

Rasmus Andersson was one of the early designers at Figma and greatly impacted how it looked over the years. His thoughts on the redesign: ​“Not a fan of the floating sidebars, the rounded icons or the tiny layer hit targets, but I think pretty much everything else is good.”

Designer Joel Miller: ​“We’ve reorganized our properties panel to focus on component properties and added the ability to resize the panel to see more of a component description and longer label names.”

He also shows a new approach to layout properties with new Position and Layout panels, the new Auto Layout panel, a new setting that allows you to see labels above controls, and a way to join the waitlist.

Designer Ryhan Hassan shares insights into an incredibly challenging task of redesigning Figma. See also one of the early demos of UI3 from a few years ago.

Tim Van Damme created all the beautiful new icons for the UI3. (In his podcast with Lenny, Dylan Field shared how, in the early days of Figma, he often traced Tim’s icon sets from Dribbble to test Figma’s vector capabilities. Now, his icons have come full circle back to Figma.)

Pablo Stanley highlights some of the little details that were announced at Config.

All in-person attendees received this beautiful zine from Figma, exploring AI, design, and code.

Martin Bekerman is back with a new vector illustration made in Figma.

Checks out.

Great advice from Jayneil Dalal and Cecilia Uhr that I follow religiously: ​“A mistake junior designers make is they delete or overwrite their design iterations in Figma. You shouldn’t do this because you never know when you might need to use that deleted design iteration or explain to your team why that iteration didn’t work.” 

James shows how to achieve a very cool mesh gradient effect with simple tools: ​“It’s kinda silly how much you can achieve with a single blurred vector line, a gradient and a blending mode.” 

Draftocalypse seems to be over, but it’s still worth sharing this video that Tom Lowry, Director of Advocacy at Figma, put together to walk you through what’s changing and answer a few common questions. 

Jacob Miller shares two variables tips to avoid the most common problems: 1) ​“Never create a mode that shouldn’t be set at the page level” (read more about inheriting a context), and 2) ​“Never publish a variable that users shouldn’t consume” (see why component-scoped variables can 10x the number of variables you ship). Don’t miss discussions in replies. 

Lots of small improvements and a few bigger changes, like an unread filter and inline comment replies. 

Whoa, finally! Can’t believe this is getting fixed a few days before Config. Add bold, italic, underline, or strikethrough font style to a portion of text with an applied style without detaching it first.

Jordan Singer shares a few things he learned while designing and building AI at Figma.

Dan Hollick shared his Creator Micro setup (with a beautiful illustration, of course!), and there are some good ideas in replies as well. I also shared my setup on Twitter.

Using it for a few weeks made me dream of eink key caps that can be updated based on the current mode. I find it hard to remember what keys do across four modes, so I rarely switch them. Elgato Stream Deck might be the answer, but I’m not a big fan of the look.

Designer Advocate Ana Boyer with a reminder to plan your tokens and variables implementation before creating them in Figma. ​“In general, building then refactoring your variables is much more work than taking more time to plan before implementing. As they say: measure twice, cut once.” (That said, making refactoring easier in Figma won’t hurt.)

Matt D. Smith boiled down his design process into eight steps. I love how a big part of it is conditional on the project’s complexity. So many designers make the mistake of following a complicated process and taking extra steps on more straightforward projects, where that time is better spent on another round of experimentation or iteration. (See also the above quote from Linear.)

The move of drafts to teams caused a big enough uproar in the Figma community to warrant an explanation from Dylan Field, the CEO of Figma. Dann Petty made one of the strongest arguments against this change.

The strong feelings made me wonder about the differences in how we use Figma, and it probably comes down to handling multiple accounts and teams. I usually have two Figma accounts — one for personal projects and another tied to my work email address. Each account has its own drafts, so my personal drafts are never mixed with work. If you’re a freelancer and a part of multiple teams with a single email address, all your drafts are mixed, and separating them can feel like an invasion into your personal space. I don’t share the strong feelings on this change, but can see where Dann and others are coming from. (Pro tip: I use a separate Figma Beta app for the personal account, so I never have to switch accounts in the app.)