Videos

Molly Hellmuth hosted a Q&A with Lewis Healey, Lead Designer for Atlassian’s Design Systems. They discussed how 55 designers on his team collaborate with over 600 product designers and thousands of engineers, ensuring cohesive design through Figma-based foundations and a targeted 95% adoption rate of design standards. Lewis emphasized flexibility in component use, a focus on education through champions and office hours, and precise tracking with custom dashboards to monitor design system adoption across 20 products.

Luis and Molly discuss how every small and large decision was made in Figma’s Simple Design System.

A good demo of all Figma AI features by Tair from a few months ago.

In this workshop, Miggi explores approaches to Advanced prototyping in Figma: ​“We‘ll walk through examples using variables and component sets to create dynamic prototypes that are easy to manage and iterate upon. This is an intermediate level workshop and builds on a basic understanding of prototyping in Figma Design.”

Smart technique and a cool effect! Blur is a power tool in capable hands.

Linear launched a series of conversations with product leaders on how things of quality get built: ​“What is quality? It seems hard to describe and even harder to measure, but you can feel it when it’s there. You know it when you experience it.”

“Join Luis from Figma and Daniel Henderson-Ede to talk all things accessibility with components, variables, and design at scale. Daniel is an accessibility expert and has contributed to the CVS accessibility kit, now used by companies, and has inspired new kits from GitHub, to document how components can be used and handed off to development teams.”

“Notion, Arc and Figma are teaming up to help you have your best semester yet. Join us for a special Back-to-School webinar featuring an exclusive panel with all 3 co-founder/CEOs (Dylan Field, Figma; Ivan Zhao, Notion; Josh Miller, The Browser Company) reflecting on their student days, followed by demos from fellow students showing how they set up these tools to organize their busy lives (and tame the chaos).”

Kaitie Chambers and Miggi kicked off the first episode of monthly Release Notes, where they dropped new features and recapped everything shipped in September. Readers of this newsletter will be already familiar with most of the changes, but there are some new things worth covering. 

UI3 rolls out for everyone on October 10th. The biggest change in the final version is the return of fixed panels — Figma listened to the feedback from the design community and closed the gaps. The panels still float when the Minimize UI (Shift-\) mode is turned on. Other changes include the always visible Auto Layout pixel values along the resize modes, the layer header showing 3 reorganized actions by default and one more when the panel is wider on larger screens, and showing the component library info in the component properties panel. It’s now even easier to set the Auto Layout object’s width and height to Fill Container or Hug Contents via the quick actions menu (Cmd-K) or a custom macOS shortcut.

After research or brainstorming sessions, FigJam stickies can now be sorted by color, author, stamp count, or stamp type in addition to the previously announced FigJam AI. Figma Slides now supports custom slide deck templates, which can even be published in the community. Slides are now viewable on your mobile device, so you can view and join a presentation from anywhere. 

Gary Simon makes a controversial case for not using grids in design. My 2 cents: grids help reduce the number of decisions you need to make, and maintaining a large set of mockups laid out with guides instead of Auto Layout sounds like a nightmare. That said, I think grids and Auto Layout should be added after figuring out the right direction, spacing, and hierarchy, not in the beginning.

In this video, Ridd shares the behind-the-scenes process of redesigning a website for Genway, from generating and exploring new ideas to skipping wireframing and going straight to high-fidelity work to progressively presenting ideas to stakeholders.

In this webinar, Designer Advocates Corey Lee and Hugo Raymond will guide you through communicating effectively through story-driven presentations and share techniques to up-level your slide designs to make your presentations and decks more compelling. ​“Good design tells a compelling story. How you convey that story can significantly impact its resonance with your audience.“

Luis Ouriach: ​“No one can deny the importance of accessibility, but successfully embedding accessibility into the heart of a business is no simple task. So where do you start?”

It was a great episode of the ​“In the File” series, where Luis Ouriach talks to the designer Yann-Edern Gillet and engineer Andreas Eldh from Linear about the recent update of their design system. I love their use of the LCH color space to generate a consistent palette and tight collaboration between design and engineering.

“You can get the attention of your audience and better communicate your ideas by turning them into simple, compelling stories. Join this livestream with Janis Ozolins to learn the principles of visual communication and see how to create compelling visuals in Figma Slides in a few easy steps.“

“Come learn the basics of how to use Figma Slides to communicate with your team and present to stakeholders. You’ll learn how to create, edit, and polish a Slide deck and how to present to your stakeholders.”

Figma Developer Advocate Jake Albaugh joins a livestream on the Visual Studio Code channel to talk about Figma for VS Code extension, allowing developers to easily access and inspect designs from VS Code.

In a short video, Ridd shows how to set up and use the Raycast Figma File Search extension to navigate your Figma files quickly.

“Diana Mounter, Head of Design at GitHub, hosted a panel of Hubbers from research, engineering, and design, discussing everything from customer-first approaches to the integration of AI, and collaboration across GitHub teams.”

Sam Oshin, Senior Director of Brand and Marketing at GitHub, demonstrates how GitHub’s brand team uses Figma and a unique philosophy to building and maintaining brand systems.