Tweets

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.)

A nice little update to the Figma mobile app. I like how the app is focused on real-world ​“jobs to be done“ instead of shoehorning the whole Figma experience into the phone.

Minor but helpful change to the color picker — limit the options only to the current page.

Vijay is doing his magic with a modular illustration built from components.

Meng To shows a website made entirely in Figma and exported to React with Loco​fy​.ai, which I wrote about in issue #155. Responsive layout, breakpoints, pages, animations — everything just works. He gives a few tips on preparing your design for the seamless export to code.

That’s not all! Now, you can also select multiple pages by holding Shift to rename, delete, or move them in bulk.

I fully expected all big product announcements to be saved for Config, but we have an unexpected treat! Jokes aside, this is a very elegant solution based on how people already organize their files. Reminds me of how Twitter came up with retweets and the book The Best Interface is No Interface.

“When you name a page in Figma using only hyphens, en/​em dashes, asterisks or spaces, that page will now automatically convert into a page divider.”

After his original video of a futuristic speedometer with a smoke effect got a ton of traction, Alex Barashkov published the Figma file and recorded a detailed 33-minute-long step-by-step tutorial on making it.

Cameron Moll shares his thinking on delight and utility: ​“Utility is the value a user derives from interacting with your product. […] Delight is the satisfaction a user derives from interacting with your product. […] Design, Product, Engineering must work closely to put utility first. But each of these — Design in particular — must also advocate for delight to transform product value from ​“need to” to ​“want to.” Prioritizing delight is another form of slowing down to speed up.” See more of his thoughts on delight.

Stripe puts their money where their mouth is. The new User Experience Assurance team is ​“focused on evaluating and improving user experiences across all of Stripe’s products. This team evaluates, measures, and tracks the experience quality of Stripe’s user journeys. You will work closely with product teams to ensure that Stripe products meet or exceed our high quality bar.”

Use the new ​“Set variable mode” prototype action to change the variable mode of the current page. See the new section in the help article or try it out in an updated Advanced prototyping playground file.