Videos

At Smashing Meets Figma event, Christine Vallaure showed how to add real data to your Figma designs, and various ways to include Google Sheets and API data via Kernel.

Miggi on using sections in Figma for prototypes and how to preserve the state of a given flow.

“In this livestream, Jake, Lauren, and Emil dive into Dev Mode, the newest space in Figma built for developers.”

It was really cool to relive the conference through Charli’s vlog. I’ve been covering her work for years, and we briefly met in person at Zeplin’s after-party. Now I have a huge FOMO from missing the Design Life podcast meetup, as I headed out to the airport. (Fun fact: I discovered Femke’s work through her vlog from the first Config in 2020, and she is Charli’s co-host of the podcast.)

Designer advocate Ana Boyer demonstrates the new advanced prototyping features by building an e‑commerce experience.

Learn how to use min and max values when working with the auto layout in your designs, with a bonus of updated text truncation and max lines feature for paragraph text.

Miggi with a tip on using the new auto layout wrap to handle elements beyond just a single row. Love that Shift-A automatically puts elements into a wrapped auto layout when you have multiple rows of elements selected.

Shivani used an AI service to make Config 2023 recordings searchable and generate summaries and takeaways. While AI summarization can be hit or miss, searching by a keyword through all talks is surprisingly useful!

Miggi covers the different ways that variables can be added when creating prototypes, and how you can use them to make them more dynamic and with fewer frames. We cover all of the currently available variable types: booleans, numbers, strings, colors, and even discuss how to bind string variables to interactive components.

CSS Evangelist Kevin Powell made a video walkthrough of the new Dev Mode specifically for other developers. Share it with your team!

Great video from Chad on a conversion technique I described above. Recommend watching this video before you embark on a journey to update your color system.

The first segment of the opening talk of the second day, with Noah Levin and Diagram team discussing how AI will shape our future and work. Continue by watching Generative AI and Creative Arms Race by Ovetta Patrice Sampson from Google, AI and empowering creative careers by Scott Belsky and Brooke Hopper from Adobe, and wrap up with The crescendo of AI in our collective future by Kanjun Qiu and Reid Hoffman.

An in-depth session with Designer Advocate Miggi, Software Engineer Ricky Rajani, and PM Garrett Miller on how to build even higher fidelity prototypes with less complexity.

Software Engineer Jon Kaplan, Product Designers Nikolas Klein and Chia Amisola, and Prototyping Product Manager Garrett Miller talk about the newly announced advanced prototyping features.

A short video tutorial on building advanced prototypes with variables and two new prototyping actions: Set Variables and Conditional.

An in-depth session by Designer Advocate Luis Ouriach and Design Systems PM Jacob Miller on how you can level up your design system in Figma for better scalability, theming, and more using variables.

This short video tutorial covers how variables work, and how to use them to represent design tokens and account for different modes and themes.

An in-depth session with practical perspectives on how designers and developers can leverage brand new Figma capabilities to unlock tighter collaboration with one another, prepared by four Figmates — Developer Advocate Jake Albaugh, Group Product Manager Avantika Gomes, Designer Advocate Lauren Andres, and Software Engineer Jenny Lea.

A YouTube playlist with recordings of all 47 sessions (some split into multiple videos) from Config. As the conference had 5 tracks on the first day and 6 tracks on the second, I didn’t attend most of those sessions and looking forward to catching up during the next few weeks.

If you have time for only one thing this week, this should be it. First, Figma CEO Dylan Field introduces new features — variables, auto layout updates, and advanced prototyping. Then, CTO Kris Rasmussen talks about rethinking product building from the ground up and how the new Dev Mode is bringing design and engineering closer together. In the end, Dylan talks about file browser refresh, font previews, and what AI could look like in Figma — wrapping things up by announcing the acquisition of Diagram.

I watched every Config keynote over the years, and this year’s announcements were the most anticipated and ambitious ever. It’s incredible to see how Figma is growing in depth and breadth at the same time, now providing incredibly advanced tools while covering an entire product-building process from brainstorming to design to development. Exciting time to be a maker.