Videos

Rob Hope interviews a design wizard Vijay Verma. ​“Vijay Verma is a talented designer renowned for his intricate Figma art and his extensive portfolio of free digital resources. In this episode, we explore his humble beginnings as an electrician in India and his rise to become one of the most beloved designers in the Figma community. Additionally, we have a special case study where Vijay walks us through his character design process, complete with a bonus time-lapse recording he sent after the interview.” 

The other day, I was looking for a tutorial on a specific animation technique and found this course by Tim Gabe. It’s free and has high-quality content — worth checking out!

What a fun project! A new interview series looking inside Figma files of the top designers. The first season includes six interviews with folks from Perplexity AI, LottieFiles, Bezi, and other companies. There is much value in just sharing the screen and walking through your actual work files instead of creating an idealized version of the design process.

“In this two part series, we’re using variables to build an advanced prototype of an interactive, configurable volume bar. Configurable prototypes are easily customized and adapted and allow us to edit and change interactions in less time. In this first video, we’re going to set up the foundation of our interaction.”

A new video in Luis Ouriach’s ​“My First Variable” series on the typography support within variables. He explains using string and number variables to set font weights, combining weights with styles such as italics, grouping text variables, aliasing font families, naming conventions, and more.

Christine Vallaure’s talk at last year’s SmashingConf on CSS Container Queries and how designers can tackle them using Figma. If videos are not your jam, see her article on Why UI designers should understand Flexbox and CSS Grid.

Dylan Field, cofounder and CEO of Figma, discusses the company’s next phase of growth with Bloomberg’s Brody Ford at Bloomberg Tech in San Francisco.

Marisa unpacks and shows how to set up the keypad.

An older but very detailed video on setting up and configuring Creator Micro.

A talk from Stripe’s Sessions 2024 conference on why well-crafted products are expressions of care and dedication — and how that correlates to business success. Head of Design Katie Dill kicks it off by talking about the value of quality and dispelling some of the myths and common-held beliefs about craft and beauty — that it is ​“in the eye of the beholder,” purely cosmetic, and at odds with growth. In Stripe’s experience, beauty is objective, functional, and support growth.

Later, she invites the cofounder and CEO of Linear, Karri Saarinen, and the CPO of Figma, Yuhki Yamashita, to share their thoughts on craft and beauty. I like Karri’s separation of these concepts — ​“craft is the mindset and activity you do, and the quality and beauty are the output.” You can also read the recap of this talk on the Figma blog.

Elliot Tu from Zeplin interviewed me for their Design-to-Dev community interview series last week. We chatted about working on Figmalion, my new role, collaborating with developers, the future of design-to-dev tools, and how I use AI in my work.

I switched to Raycast from Alfred a while ago but felt like I was leaving most of its potential and power untapped. In the two parts of these videos, designer Charlie Deets shows a few generic and design-specific features that he uses all the time.

“The Library Analytics API, part of the Figma REST API, lets you fetch analytics data about how your organization’s design system libraries are being used. The API provides similar information to the in-product library analytics feature, but in a format that you can use to do more fine-grained, custom analysis. In this video Gerard shows how to get started with the API, and shows how you might use the data.”

Gerard walks us through the Variables API, showing how it can keep values in sync with your code base and how applications such as StyleDictionary can transform them into usable code for multiple platforms. See the repository with GitHub Actions workflow examples.

Even while the new Dev Mode replaced the old Inspect panel, all information is still available regardless of your plan, seat type, or file access. This tutorial covers inspecting designs in Figma, depending on your plan and access level.

MDS launched a free course that teaches the basics of Figma in one hour with 12 fast-paced videos. The production quality is totally bonkers, and Matt’s knowledge is so deep that even Figma experts might pick up something new.

“In this video, Jory Raphael and Noah Jacobus from Font Awesome will guide you through the crafting of their Config presentation, from initial napkin sketches to final polished slides. They share valuable insights, best practices, and tips for compelling storytelling, while sharing how they made their presentation uniquely ​‘Awesome’.”

Christine Vallaure shows how to use typography variables and modes to create responsive typography across different screen sizes. The video also covers applying multiple modes at once and automated typeface changes, such as for iOS and Android setups.

Developer Advocate Jake explains some of the reasons why product experience can be misaligned between design and development. He points out that the source of truth can vary depending on the scenario, from the design system to the code in production to the design files. To find the truth, we have to ask a few questions: ​“What do we want?”, ​“What do we have?” and ​“What is the difference?”

The second edition of the UI Battle! Watch as Miggi from Figgi aka The Notorious PNG, Pablo Stanley aka The Layer Slayer, and Mariana Pedroza aka Da Design Thunder take on design challenges, shit-talk, and throw a fantastic performance. This is the only live sport I need!