After years in the making, I’m so excited to share our redesigned Figma, stripping back the interface to really focus on your work, and introduce a broad range of usability improvements across the system.
We’re rolling out in beta starting today at Config, and I can’t wait for
Excited to (finally) release dark mode in
@figma
.
Behind the scenes, making this happen required some significant changes to our color system. For more about how it works,
@pwnies
and I are giving a talk about the new system at Config!
I’m *super* excited to start rolling out a redesigned version of comments in Figma and FigJam. It makes it easier for collaborators to chime in, and gives designers more tools to manage feedback.
@figmadesign
Some design details:
🌈 Dropbox Paper update - you can now draw a timeline in any Paper doc. It’s been super handy while planning projects to visualize when things need to happen, and keep everyone involved on the same page.
Some news - after a good 5 years, today is my last day at
@DropboxDesign
.
Thank you thank you thank you for taking a chance on me, mentoring me, and making the work so rewarding. I feel super nostalgic, a little sad, and very very excited.
Super excited to announce this. We’ve been quietly working on a new email client designed to keep you calm and focused at work.
We’ve kept it invite-only for a while, and we're finally ready to open up access.
With design twitter fading, I was thinking about how much I owe and miss the design community from 10 years ago. I wonder if there will ever be a thing quite like that again
👋 Another Dropbox Paper update — we just shipped more powerful tables!
To make it easier to coordinate projects, we’ve been quietly redesigning tables to support headers, sorting, background colors, images, better resizing, and more.
I've been seeing neat shader visual effects popping up everywhere - there are some fun ones in iOS - and have wanted to bring these into my own prototypes.
Definitely learning as I go, but making these little toy files as I fiddle around.
So excited to ship this, and finally make it easy to work across your work and personal accounts.
This took a huge team effort, particularly since we needed to touch so many layers to get this right — from identity/auth, to the file browser, editor, desktop app, and Community.
Next up:
Do you use Figma for work? Yes.
And for your personal projects? Also yes.
Now you can switch accounts seamlessly, flipping between your design system and the side projects you bought domains for and are totally going to finish.
Stay tuned, more tomorrow 🎉
Using that model as a reference, we tweaked things like lighting position, texture / material (particularly to create contrast between the red bits), and perspective to emphasize the sense of depth.
Started poking around Figma's plugins api. Nothing novel, but made something to keep frames organized / named the way I prefer (100px apart, starting at 0,0, and named "0.0 Title", "0.1 Title", etc)
❤️Over the last few months, FigJam has been incredibly helpful for exploring ideas together with everyone on the team, especially during the pandemic.
Huge congrats to the team. Some stellar work from
@jenny_wen
and
@keeyeny
Possibly my favorite part — plugin developers have access to the same tokens we use internally, so plugins like Automator (hi
@jsngr
) will look and feel perfectly in sync with “native” Figma UI.
Sad news to share today, we are shutting down Consider. 😢
Huge thank you to everyone who supported us. ❤️
If you are looking to hire some very talented folks, please DM or email (ben
@consider
.co).
More here:
The new comments in Figma and FigJam are now available to everyone!
Pro tip: You can hit “C” to quickly start writing a new comment, and “Shift + C” to show / hide comment pins.
Our new and improved comments have now rolled out to everyone. ✨ Thanks for your patience as we made comments better you.
Here's more info on all the changes:
And a thread with some of our favorite changes. 👇
Having lots of pins can quickly feel overwhelming, so when you zoom out, we’ll cluster comments in an area into a simplified shape to minimize visual noise. And when you click on that cluster, we’ll smoothly zoom you back in, and animate the pins to preserve spatial continuity.
These widgets feel like an alternate reality for software, where
- software is collaborative by default
- widgets have simple, encapsulated behavior that can be quickly reused/remixed
- outputs are directly manipulable
- no need to install, just copy & paste
- things are playful!
Week before launch, I hit this roller coaster of feelings — stress as we finalize things, excitement seeing things all together, and appreciation for so many people sprinting to make it happen.
This year has been *busy*
We've been discussing ideas for UI3 since 2020, and it's so exciting to finally see folks using it out in the wild.
For a behind the scenes look into the redesigned Figma,
@okaysee
@_joelmllr
and I gave a talk at Config covering our thinking, details, and iterations.
Under the hood, this meant defining a semantic token schema that chains parameters like prominence and interaction state, and creates a mapping to a set of color ramps. Not only does this define themes, but it also bakes in a range of accessibility improvements to color contrast
We also noticed that sometimes a single (x,y) point isn’t enough, and it’s helpful to be able to talk about a specific area in a file. With these new comments, you can now drag to highlight a region that’s tied to your comment pin.
@mgharrisdc
Looking to hire a designer for brand / interactive design work?
One of my favorite designers from Dropbox is looking for their next role - let me know if you’d like an intro!
4: 🎧 Audio!
In both FigJam & Figma, you can now use your voice to add richness to conversations as you're designing. Heather (no twitter, but ) did a great job driving design for this (in < 3 months). She also designed Community, which is now open to all!
Seeing
@joeyabanks
and
@jsngr
making things in Swift UI inspired me to poke around and try building a toy app. Made a little pomodoro timer this morning, mostly so that I could play around with haptics, sounds, and notifications.
@tricycleai
@jsngr
99% a joke, but a while back had some explorations around making a joystick-like control so that we could have an input that was more precise than your thumb
We also created a complementary set of elevations that bring a sense of realism to lighting, while improving contrast for dark elements against dark planes. For example, you might notice that some objects will cast a stronger shadow, or catch light with an inner edge highlight
Basically, I want to participate in a community where people really want to nerd out about the work itself. I know a bunch of folks are jaded or disillusioned by the tech industry — but every day I think I still wake up and get excited by the potential of computers
Stylistically, we didn’t want to overemphasize these details — you’ll see them if you look up close, but we really wanted it to feel like our consistent logo, with a nod to macOS.
Anyways, this is rolling out today — hope you enjoy!
The easy thing to do would have been to just apply an appropriate mask to the existing icon.
But to really do the new style justice, I really wanted to figure out how our logo would work as a physical object — what parts would taper or curve, and how?
I remember when I first joined figma I was surprised by the sort of big annual release moment at config — and I’ve come to really appreciate this sort of model because it creates hard conversations around what are the most important things to ship.
Simplicity will be the next theme in product.
If you ask any company what made them successful I don’t think anyone will say their advanced and complicated planning process got them there.
The first thing you might notice are the new pins. We’ve separated viewing comments from the comment “mode” to make them easier to spot, and designed them to communicate as much context as possible per pixel, including a hover state to quickly “peek” at a comment.
This is far more than just a visual reskin. We’re introducing a broad range of usability improvements across the system, from clearer inputs to resizable property panels that can (finally) accommodate longer property names.
You’ll see some incredible work from
@_joelmllr
to help
One of the things I love most about
@figma
has been seeing the methodical approach to introducing new primitives - allowing variables to not just handle theming, but also extend to conditional logic in prototypes, and show up as code in dev mode.
Huge congrats to the team!
Figma Variables lets GO. Been working on this for so long with our team over here at
@figma
, and I'm so excited to see it finally launch.
AMA about variables! Happy to answer q's.
#Config2023
👀
If you’ve ever thought to yourself “it’s crazy that designers work this way”, come work with me on *designing* how modern teams design software together.
Looking for new opportunities in 2021? We're hiring for a Product Designer to help lead an area we call Collaboration
You'd get to work with lovely folks like
@ryhanhassan
&
@meaganrgamache
and design experiences like comments, file browsing and more:
We've been using Code Connect with our own design system, and it's so exciting seeing design + code march closer together.
This bridge means that teams at Figma by default have design files connected to our actual codebase, with no extra effort.
I started using a Vision Pro for the bulk of my work day (designing things, writing, zoom calls), and it’s been working quite well for me. Using a MacBook as a virtual display with a keyboard / mouse input that can extend into vision OS was pretty helpful.
@jackiechuichui
Like, look how cool this is! Even something as simple as "what is intuitively the next match" is complex to reason about on an infinite 2d canvas
I've almost felt evil getting to use ⌘F a little while internally (especially for our big design systems files) and couldn't imagine working without it.
On the surface it feels like a simple feature, but in the depths is quite tricky, and
@jackiechuichui
did a great job here!
The hold music to handle latency is so cute, I love it.
Seeing things like this makes me desperately wish these sorts of capabilities were available OS wide in iOS
Introducing ☎️ CALL ARC, a brand new way to get an answer on the go.
Say you’re walking to the train and you’ve got a quick question.
Just raise Arc Search to your ear and ask it!
As a team, we’ve looked through nearly every corner of our system — from fundamentals like our type and grid, to core elements like our inputs that create clear affordances and uniform structure.
@w4ynesun
did a heroic job crafting an extensive new system across a wide variety of
1. It’s wild looking back at
@keeyeny
’s early prototypes of Figma Slides
2. I think it’s such a good habit to record end to end demos of how an idea will work from the very beginning, and to iterate on the story alongside the product itself
Thinking about what form factor might eventually replace our phones (watch, pin, glasses?) and I can’t help but feel like input is a limiting factor. To replace a phone, I think you need to compete against a touchscreen keyboard.
It was so good to (finally) chat with
@vernalkick
and
@rafahari
– not to mention talking about designing Figma comments in Figma at Figma. Thanks again for having me!
220: Figma's Redesigned Comments, with Ryhan Hassan
This week, we're joined by friend of the show
@ryhanhassan
, designer at Figma, to tell us all about how they've redesigned Comments. It’s a fun one!
We’ve been iterating on these comments for a little while, and it’s been neat to see how much these changes have shifted how teams use comments together.
For example, within our design team, comments have become the primary way we run our crits (like this one, on comments!)
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if Figma’s internal design-wip channel was semi-public, and you all could see the earliest sketches from the design team.
It would either be incredible for feedback, _or_ the internet would melt down and discourse would squash delicate ideas
In retrospect, part of the magic was that as a student, I could share any little thing I was working on — whereas now, it’s much harder to share true WIP work publicly (without worrying about revealing product plans, or throwing people for a loop)
We know getting used to a new editor and building muscle memory takes time, so we’ve baked in an easy way to switch back and forth between versions instantly. For most people, it takes a few hours to adapt, but we think the new design editor will feel great once you settle in.
It's really fun being part of a team that's working in a good rhythm, balancing feature requests, bug fixes, and early ideas.
Over the last 5 days the team shipped 5 good updates
As someone who used to be the person trying to decipher redlined design specs, it’s exciting to start to lay the groundwork to help map design intent to production code.
The inspect tab has all the basics you'd expect, so you can easily copy color, type, and layout details.
The real magic comes when your abstractions in Figma start to map to code. For example with variants, engineers can select a component and directly copy the props they need.
Holy shit, the AI features in Slack are incredibly helpful – being able to save almost a full hour by summarizing "low stakes" channels / finding answers quickly is huge
One highlight — I distinctly remember Forrst (hi
@kylebragger
!) as being a genuinely constructive community. It felt like a place where folks wrote actual context, and left more real feedback than dribbble — and I wish it came back more than ever.
Really enjoyed reading through the PDF at the end — it’s wonderful. I would love to see more tools emerge that are designed to facilitate the process of capturing, organizing, and synthesizing fragments of ideas into new, meaningful concepts.
Every Friday, we've been ending the week as a team with demos of things folks shipped that week.
It's been super nice to celebrate (and have visibility) into everything going out to customers. Some nice things from our last
@considerhq
team demos of 2019...
More iteration.
@bobjlong
just shipped a redesigned inbox with dramatically better gesture handling, so that triaging your inbox feels buttery
Hidden detail — it's robust enough to handle multitouch, so you can independently swipe on multiple rows at once