Unsplash’s 2018 Awards celebrated the photographers whose free contributions helped build the platform’s alternative to traditional stock photography. The awards featured 13 categories, with selected images showcased throughout November and December and judged for overall excellence. Photographers could submit entries through December 7, 2018.
## Unsplash’s Contribution to Stock Photography
- Founded in 2013, Unsplash challenged conventional stock photography with a curated collection of high-quality, freely shared images.
- Its success depended on photographers’ generosity, skill, and willingness to contribute their work.
- The awards were created to recognize and thank these contributors.
## 2018 Award Categories
- Aerial photography
- Animals and wildlife
- Astrophotography
- Black and white
- Food and drink
- Interiors and architecture
- Mobile photography
- Nature and landscapes
- People and portraits
- Sports
- Street photography
- Tech and business
- Unsplash community
## Submission and Judging
- Submissions were open through **December 7, 2018**.
- Unsplash planned to feature work across the categories during November and December.
- Judges selected the best featured image in each category.
- Entrants could consult Unsplash’s Awards page for category definitions, judge information, and evaluation criteria.
Photographers interested in participating were encouraged to submit their work through the Unsplash Awards website.
Figma Pages can organize design files in ways that match a team’s product, process, or design-system needs. The article emphasizes that there is no single ideal workflow; Pages provide flexible separation for responsive designs, app features, process stages, and atomic design components.
## Platform or Screen Size
- Create separate Pages for Android, iOS, desktop, or other responsive breakpoints.
- Use frame presets and constraints to build platform-specific layouts.
- Each Page can contain its own prototype, making platform-specific user testing easier.
## App Feature
- Organize Pages around major product areas such as profiles, home screens, or other features.
- Designers can work independently while still referencing the broader product.
- Separate prototypes allow teams to test individual feature flows.
## Design Process Stage
- Use Pages to show progress and distinguish exploratory work from finalized designs.
- Possible structures include:
- Thumbnail, wireframes, designs, and archive
- Documentation, staging, and ready for review
- Sitemap, wireframes, mockups, QA, and marketing screenshots
- A “Done” Page helps developers identify which designs are ready to build.
- Early ideation and brainstorming can remain separate from polished work.
## Atomic Design Method
- Dedicate Pages to atomic design levels:
- Atoms, such as typography and icons
- Molecules, such as buttons
- Organisms, such as complete pages
- Consistent Page naming improves Team Library search.
- Components can use simpler names like “selected” or “hovered,” since their Page already identifies them as buttons or other component types.
Ultimately, teams should choose a Page structure that reflects how they design and collaborate, rather than follow a universal template.
LittleBits built a responsive design system to support four apps across mobile and tablet platforms with a small team and six-month deadline. They combined Figma constraints with an 8-pixel “magic number” and proportional scaling rules that were shared with their React implementation. This approach allowed one template per screen to adapt across devices with minimal redesign and engineering adjustments.
## Establishing an 8-Pixel Layout System
- Existing designs were analyzed to identify recurring dimensions and spacing.
- Most values were already close to multiples of 8, so 8 became the system’s base unit.
- Common sizes included:
- Buttons and form controls: 32, 48, 56, 64, and 96px
- Text: 16, 24, 32, and 48px
- Padding and gutters: 16, 24, and 32px
- Larger cards: 240px high
- Using a shared numeric scale helped harmonize typography, controls, margins, and padding.
## Combining Constraints with Scaling Rules
- Figma constraints allowed elements to stretch, remain pinned to edges, or align with grid columns.
- Constraints alone were not sufficient to make one layout work equally well on small phones, larger phones, and tablets.
- The team compared screen dimensions, calculated proportional relationships, and rounded the ratios into practical whole-number scaling rules.
- These rules were implemented in React alongside normal layout constraints.
- Designers used Figma’s Scale tool and frame resizing to preview how a single template would appear on different devices.
- Testing showed that tablet and small-phone layouts worked well without extensive device-specific adjustments.
## Designing Content for Different Aspect Ratios
- To avoid maintaining separate video and animation files for each screen size, content was produced in a 4:3 format.
- Important content was placed inside safe areas so it could be cropped cleanly for 16:9 displays.
- This allowed the same media assets to support multiple screen dimensions.
## Handling Text and Internationalization
- The 8-pixel system was treated as a guideline rather than an absolute rule.
- Smaller text sizes sometimes used 4-pixel increments, such as 12px and 20px, because minor size changes had a significant visual impact.
- The app was translated into six languages, including German, where longer words could exceed available space.
- Code automatically reduced text to the next smaller heading size when it did not fit.
- Additional heading sizes were introduced to support these adjustments while preserving smooth transitions between heading levels.
## Practical Scope of the System
- The app mostly used straightforward layouts with centered elements and two- or three-column structures.
- The team did not need complex responsive patterns beyond proportional scaling and basic constraints.
- The combination of a consistent spacing scale, reusable templates, Figma constraints, and shared React rules provided an efficient foundation for responsive design.
littleBits built an atomic design system in Figma to support four mobile and tablet apps across iOS and Android within a six-month roadmap. Drawing on Atomic Design and Bootstrap, the team organized reusable styles and components while adapting the structure to their actual workflow. They concluded that a simplified system aligned with React Native components was more practical than rigidly preserving separate “molecule” and “organism” categories.
## Atoms: Styles, colors, and icons
- Text styles and colors were defined with Figma Styles.
- A customized icon set based on Modern Pictograms was imported and converted into components.
- Colors used semantic names inspired by Bootstrap, including categories for:
- UI states
- Grayscale values
- Brand colors
- Backgrounds
- Overlays
- Outlines
- Semantic naming made future theme changes safer. For example, `bg-light` could consistently represent backgrounds while `ui-dark` represented foreground elements.
## Simplifying molecules and organisms
- The team found that complex molecules and organisms were rarely reused across multiple templates.
- Instead, both categories were grouped under the simpler name “Components.”
- This structure mapped more naturally to the React Native components being developed in parallel.
- Components included cards, tooltips, and foundational controls such as buttons.
## Combining styles without unnecessary components
- Figma Styles enabled designers to combine text styles and color swatches directly.
- Rather than creating separate components for every color-and-text combination, the team documented combinations in a style guide and applied styles as needed.
- Mixing text styles within a single text box also supported copy with variable lengths.
- This approach reduced document complexity and improved usability and performance.
## Reusable button components
- Buttons were treated differently because they appeared frequently and included styling details such as outlines that were harder to manage centrally in Figma.
- The team created nested components for:
- Primary buttons
- Secondary buttons
- Tertiary buttons
- Other frequently repeated custom buttons
- These reusable button components provided a consistent foundation for the broader design system.
The resulting system balanced atomic design principles with the team’s real reuse patterns, creating a practical Figma library that supported both design work and React Native implementation. The next step was applying these components to responsive layout templates.
Figma’s 2018 review describes a shift from building a collaborative design tool to building an open platform and global community around it. After launching publicly in 2016 and raising $25 million in Series B funding, Figma expanded its API, attracted businesses and developers, and grew adoption among large organizations. The company concludes that partnerships, integrations, and community initiatives will remain central to its growth.
## From Product to Community
- Figma marked roughly two years since its public launch in September 2016.
- In 2018, its focus expanded beyond the core product to include:
- The Figma Platform
- API-powered integrations
- Community events and resources
- Adoption across departments in major organizations
- Microsoft used Figma’s API to automate parts of its developer handoff process.
## The Figma Platform
- Figma launched what it called the first web API for a design tool.
- Its web-based architecture enabled integrations that would have been difficult with isolated desktop software.
- Companies such as Uber and GitHub used the API to customize their design workflows even before the public launch.
- Seven months later, businesses were being built on the platform, including paid services.
### Community-built tools
- PDF exporting
- Style-guide generation
- Find-and-replace tools for text and layer names
- JavaScript libraries for working with the Figma API
### Commercial integrations
- Avocode and Zeplin connected Figma designs to developer handoff workflows.
- Principle added advanced animation capabilities.
- Relay for Figma pushed designs directly into codebases.
- Pagedraw converted Figma designs into React.
- Overflow synchronized designs for user-flow diagrams.
- Haiku converted designs into production-ready components.
Figma expected partnerships and additional integrations to become an even larger focus in 2019.
## Building a Global Community
- Figma hosted design-system meetups in cities around the world, initially covering eight cities and later reaching 17 countries.
- Events connected designers and encouraged detailed discussions about systematic design.
- Figma launched DesignSystems.com to share practices and stories from teams at companies including Airbnb, GitHub, Braintree, and Segment.
- The company viewed community connections and shared knowledge as an extension of its open-platform strategy.
Figma’s 2018 direction was clear: continue investing in an accessible web-based tool while enabling an ecosystem of integrations, businesses, and designers around it.
Datadog handles hundreds of thousands of emails daily and uses Amazon SES for critical messages such as password resets. Because SES and CloudWatch did not provide sufficiently accessible, support-friendly event data, Datadog built a serverless pipeline that forwards SES events to Datadog Log Management. This provides low-maintenance delivery infrastructure, searchable email metrics, and monitoring for failures.
## Exporting Amazon SES Events
- SES configuration sets define which email events to capture:
- Send
- Reject
- Bounce
- Complaint
- Delivery
- Open
- Click
- Events are published to an Amazon SNS topic.
- SNS invokes an AWS Lambda function for every event.
- The Lambda forwards the event to Datadog Logs using the Datadog API key.
- Terraform provisions the SNS topic, SES configuration set, event destination, IAM role, and Lambda function.
- The example uses Python 2.7 and stores the API key as a Lambda environment variable; production systems should encrypt the key.
- This architecture avoids maintaining a custom email service while preserving visibility into email processing.
## Making SES Events Searchable in Datadog
- SES events arrive in Datadog as JSON.
- Datadog’s existing AWS integration pipeline processes the logs automatically.
- Important fields can be converted into facets directly from a log entry.
- Datadog uses fields such as the email event type and subject to quickly search for specific password reset activity.
## Monitoring and Operational Benefits
- Support teams can verify whether a recipient received or interacted with a password reset email.
- The entire delivery and logging pipeline is serverless and requires minimal maintenance.
- Monitors can be configured on the logs to alert normal escalation channels when any part of the pipeline fails.
- The solution combines the reliability of Amazon SES with Datadog’s observability and search capabilities.
Overall, routing SES events through SNS and Lambda into Datadog Log Management is a practical way to create a trusted, observable password-reset email system without operating a separate mail infrastructure.
The provided content does not include the blog post’s main article text. It contains Datadog navigation links and a promotional banner announcing Datadog as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Observability Platforms, plus a link suggesting the article concerns improving trust with Datadog Log Management.
## Datadog’s Observability Platform
- Datadog promotes a broad observability platform covering:
- Infrastructure and cloud monitoring
- Application performance monitoring
- Logs and sensitive-data protection
- Security monitoring
- Digital experience monitoring
- Software delivery and service management
- AI-powered investigation and automation
- The banner highlights Datadog’s recognition as a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader.
## Log Management and Trust
- The linked article appears to focus on improving trust through Datadog Log Management.
- The supplied text does not provide details about the specific problems, technologies, or recommendations discussed in the post.
A complete summary requires the article’s actual body text rather than the surrounding website navigation.
Uber’s expansion into emerging markets required designing for differences in language, literacy, devices, culture, location, and user roles. For its cash-payment initiatives, product designer Femke van Schoonhoven adopted Figma after fragmented tools made collaboration and research iteration difficult. Figma became a shared, web-based source of truth that reduced communication overhead, improved engineer handoff, and enabled distributed teams to work together more effectively.
## Designing for Diverse Markets
- Uber serves millions of riders across dozens of countries, requiring experiences that work across very different local contexts.
- Designers conduct extensive research, including riding with drivers and testing designs in real-world environments.
- Emerging-market design must account for:
- Language and literacy
- Device limitations
- Culture and location
- Whether the user is a rider, driver, or another participant
- Cash payments were particularly important for reaching users without access to traditional banking.
## Problems with the Previous Workflow
- The Cash team used separate tools for design, prototyping, sharing, feedback, and engineering handoff.
- Designers had to repeatedly import and export files and communicate project status outside the design tool.
- During field research, only one person could edit a design at a time, preventing real-time iteration with teammates.
- This made it difficult to respond immediately to feedback from Uber drivers.
## Figma Enables Real-Time Collaboration
- Van Schoonhoven moved existing files into Figma through a simple drag-and-drop process.
- She could create prototypes using local languages and realistic, in-context materials.
- Multiple team members could edit the same design simultaneously, whether working nearby or across countries.
- Figma’s file organization made designs easier to locate and maintain.
## A Single Source of Truth
- Stakeholders could access the latest designs directly instead of requesting updates by email.
- Figma reduced communication overhead by an estimated 75 percent.
- Engineers could be invited into design files, view current changes, and comment in context.
- Early engineering involvement made handoff faster and less error-prone.
- The shared workspace helped replace siloed work with a central design repository.
## Supporting Distributed Projects
- Figma provided the collaborative foundation for projects involving designers in Amsterdam, San Francisco, and other locations.
- Teams could access shared Uber platform components and work from the same current files.
- Because the tool was web-based, stakeholders could share designs and obtain approvals more quickly.
Figma helped Uber’s designers adapt payment experiences for unbanked users by combining rapid iteration, shared context, and cross-location collaboration. For distributed product teams working across complex markets, a centralized collaborative design environment can substantially reduce friction from research through engineering handoff.
Figma introduced an integration with Principle that lets designers turn static Figma files into advanced, interactive prototypes without coding. Designs can be imported into Principle, animated with realistic transitions and interactions, and later synchronized with Figma while preserving those animations. The integration combines Figma’s collaborative design workflow with Principle’s simple but powerful motion-prototyping tools.
## Importing Figma Designs into Principle
- Open Principle, choose **Import**, and authorize Figma as a design source.
- Imported designs can be enhanced with:
- Scrolling pages
- Swipeable image cards
- Interactive button states
- Spring, ease-in, ease-out, and linear animations
- These features help static designs behave more like real mobile applications.
## Principle’s Visual Prototyping Approach
- Principle provides a visual interface intended to feel familiar to interface designers.
- Users can create realistic prototypes without learning to code.
- Its balance of simplicity and power helps designers remain focused on visual creativity rather than switching into an engineering mindset.
## Synchronizing Changes Between Figma and Principle
- Designers can continue editing the original Figma file after importing it.
- Principle detects Figma changes and merges them into the imported prototype.
- For example, resizing a button in Figma automatically updates its size in Principle while retaining the animations already assigned to it.
## API-Based Integration
- The integration was built using Figma’s web-based API.
- Principle’s creator used Figma’s API documentation and API Explorer to understand and test how individual files and objects are represented.
- The API Explorer lets developers enter a Figma file ID and inspect the resulting API calls, making it easier to experiment with the platform.
The integration is recommended for designers who want to add sophisticated motion and interaction to Figma designs quickly. Import a Figma file into Principle, refine its animations visually, and use synchronization to keep the prototype aligned with ongoing design changes.
Mobile AR platforms from Apple and Google made immersive 3D experiences accessible to mainstream app developers, but their design guidance remains limited. The author argues that Google’s guidelines are more practical and comprehensive than Apple’s, particularly for object placement and onboarding, yet both focus mostly on simple single-scene experiences. Designers must therefore develop their own best practices for complex, interactive, and collaborative AR applications.
## AR Design Becomes Mainstream
- ARKit and ARCore shifted 3D UX from specialized VR hardware to mobile devices potentially reaching hundreds of millions of users.
- Designers accustomed to mature 2D workflows faced unfamiliar 3D concepts and fragmented tools borrowed from gaming, film, architecture, and engineering.
- Apple and Google responded with dedicated augmented-reality design guidelines.
## Where Both Guidelines Fall Short
- Both focus primarily on simple object placement and sticker-like experiences.
- They do not adequately address:
- Object selection and hidden-object interaction
- Conditional behaviors
- Branching storyboards and scene flows
- Teleportation and portals
- Physical gestures
- Multi-scene applications
- Triggered or timed animation
- Shared and collaborative AR environments
- This narrow scope limits guidance for creating deeper personalization, state changes, and immersive interaction.
## Google’s Guidelines Compared with Apple’s
- Apple’s guidance is relatively brief and concentrates largely on placing objects on detected surfaces.
- Google provides more practical coverage, including:
- Tap-to-place
- Drag-to-place
- Free placement
- Realism and basic physics
- UI components
- Onboarding and experience design
- The author questions Google’s assumptions that objects should generally be placed within the user’s reach, since AR may also involve throwing, pointing, or interacting with distant objects.
- Despite its gaps, Google’s guidance is considered the stronger starting point and appears to be evolving.
## Designers Must Define New Best Practices
- Official guidelines cannot keep pace with the breadth of experimentation by AR designers and developers.
- Individuals such as Unity designer Bushra Mahmood have created more extensive independent AR guidance.
- Other teams are assembling new workflows from existing tools to prototype functional AR applications.
- This grassroots experimentation may help establish 3D UX conventions before immersive headsets become widespread.
Apple and Google provide useful foundations, but neither adequately supports complex AR design. Designers should use Google’s more developed guidance as a starting point while actively creating and sharing patterns for multi-scene, interactive, animated, and collaborative experiences.
Smart Selection is designed to reduce the repetitive work involved in arranging and refining multiple objects in Figma. It lets designers adjust spacing, position, and size directly on the canvas, helping them explore ideas faster while preserving familiar design workflows. The accompanying Tidy Up feature automatically organizes uneven selections into consistently spaced layouts.
## Smart Selection
- Works automatically on selections or groups of three or more objects with uniform spacing.
- Pink handles between objects let users adjust the spacing of all items at once.
- A ring control allows objects to be rearranged quickly.
- Selecting an item’s pink ring enables resizing by dragging its edges.
- The feature is implemented as a direct canvas interaction rather than a separate tool or object type.
## Tidy Up
- Tidy Up converts messy arrangements into evenly spaced groups suitable for Smart Selection.
- It shifts selected items closer together while maintaining consistent spacing.
- Unlike a traditional distribute command, it ensures spacing is even and compact.
- It is useful for organizing tables, toolbars, and large sets of screens.
- A layout containing 20 screens, for example, can be aligned in one action instead of manually correcting 19 separate gaps.
- The command is available through the right sidebar, with shortcuts:
- macOS: `⌥⌘T`
- Other platforms: `Ctrl-Alt-T`
## Future Development
- Figma planned to add support for two-dimensional grids.
- The team invited users to provide feedback through the in-app help button or Spectrum.
Smart Selection and Tidy Up are intended to replace tedious manual resizing, moving, and spacing adjustments with fast, intuitive canvas interactions, allowing designers to spend more time exploring creative possibilities.
Figma’s redesigned keyboard shortcut panel is inspired by Douglas Engelbart’s 1968 demonstration of fluid, two-handed computer interaction. The post argues that combining mouse control with practiced keyboard shortcuts lets designers work through motor memory and enter a state of flow. Figma’s new panel aims to make shortcuts easier and more enjoyable to discover and learn.
## Engelbart’s Two-Handed Computing
- Douglas Engelbart’s landmark demo presented computers as tools for personal work and collaboration, not merely corporate calculation.
- He used a mouse in one hand and a chorded “keyset” in the other:
- The mouse selected objects.
- The keyset issued commands, such as deleting a word while moving toward it.
- This combination made his interaction appear remarkably fluid—like “dealing lightning with both hands.”
- The effect depended on motor memory: repeated physical actions become instinctive, allowing users to focus on their goals rather than the mechanics of the tool.
## Keyboard Shortcuts and Creative Flow
- Skilled Figma users similarly move across the canvas, restyle objects, and create designs without looking at their hands.
- A mouse is relatively easy for beginners to learn, while keyboard shortcuts require deliberate practice before becoming automatic.
- Mastering both devices can help designers work faster and maintain focus on the problems they are solving.
## Figma’s Redesigned Shortcut Panel
- The old shortcut panel was difficult to scan and occupied much of the screen, interfering with learning through experimentation.
- The new panel appears beneath the canvas and can be opened through the help menu or with **Ctrl+Shift+?**.
- Shortcuts are organized into categories based on the user’s work:
- Shape and vector tools
- Typography
- Two-handed mouse-and-keyboard combinations
- Beginner-friendly shortcuts
- Examples include using **Alt** while moving the mouse to measure objects and **⌘+\\** to hide interface chrome.
- The panel highlights shortcuts as they are pressed and remembers them, encouraging users to reflect on and expand their shortcut habits.
Figma’s approach treats shortcut learning as a gradual path toward fluency: provide relevant suggestions, reinforce what users already use, and reveal powerful combinations that can eventually become second nature.
Figma apologized for launching an API challenge that the design community viewed as unpaid “spec work.” The challenge aimed to encourage a Figma-to-Sketch export and support a more open design ecosystem, but Figma acknowledged that its enthusiasm overshadowed the risk of exploiting creative labor. The company paused the challenge and later decided not to pursue any version of it.
## The API Challenge and Its Goal
- Figma launched a challenge focused on building a Figma-to-Sketch export.
- Its stated purpose was to promote an open ecosystem and help fund tools for exporting data from Figma.
- The initiative was intended to expand interoperability within the design toolchain.
## Community Criticism
- Designers quickly criticized the challenge as “spec work”—unpaid creative work submitted with no guaranteed compensation.
- The backlash reflected broader concerns about skilled workers being asked to produce valuable work without fair payment.
- Figma recognized that the challenge conflicted with its stated belief that creatives should be paid.
## Figma’s Response
- CEO Dylan Field acknowledged that the company had made a mistake.
- Figma said it had been “swept away” by its enthusiasm for making the platform more open.
- The company paused the challenge and considered alternative structures that would not require participants to work without guaranteed compensation.
- In a later update dated November 19, 2018, Figma said it would not move forward with any version of the challenge at that time.
Figma’s experience illustrates the importance of designing developer and creative programs around clear compensation and consent, especially when participants’ work could directly benefit a commercial product.
Figma announced a $15,000 API challenge to encourage developers to build an open-source Figma-to-Sketch converter. The contest reflected Figma’s goal of supporting an open design ecosystem, even when that meant exporting files to a competitor. However, after community concerns, Figma paused the challenge and ultimately cancelled it in November 2018.
## Open Design Platform and API Challenge
- Figma wanted to make it easier for designers to move projects between tools.
- The challenge focused on building a Figma-to-Sketch exporter using Figma’s read API.
- Figma positioned this as a natural extension of its existing Sketch import support.
- The company was also responding to community-built API projects, such as style-guide generators and Alexa integrations.
- Future challenges were intended to reward developers who open-sourced useful Figma integrations.
## Evaluation Criteria
- Submissions had to export two test files:
- A basic file containing common Figma objects.
- A more complex file involving typography, components, styles, and prototypes.
- The basic file was expected to have clearer correctness criteria.
- The advanced file required subjective judgment because Figma and Sketch do not always have equivalent one-to-one features.
- Judges would consider:
- Accuracy of the exported designs.
- Ease of use.
- Creativity in translating incompatible features.
- Code quality and GitHub documentation.
- Code quality and documentation accounted for 5% of the score.
## Rules, Prizes, and Submissions
- First place would receive $10,000; second place would receive $5,000.
- Teams could include up to three people.
- Entrants generally had to be over 21 and located in an eligible country.
- Projects were submitted through a Google Form.
- Each project needed a GitHub repository containing a README and MIT License.
- The planned contest period was October 2 through November 16, 2018.
## Judges and Community Focus
- The judging panel combined design expertise with experience building tools and community resources.
- Members included Emily Plummer, Raph D’Amico, Cat Noone, and Roy van Rooijen.
- Their backgrounds covered design systems, interaction design, accessibility tools, plugins, and design-tool development.
## Cancellation
- Figma initially announced that the challenge would be paused and potentially relaunched after community feedback.
- On November 19, 2018, the company said it would not proceed with any version of the challenge at that time.
The challenge demonstrated Figma’s ambition to promote interoperability and an open platform, but its eventual cancellation showed the importance of addressing community concerns before incentivizing integrations involving a direct competitor.
Figma launched Local Communities to help designers connect, learn, and collaborate in person after successful Design System Meetups across eight cities and four continents. The initiative began with groups in more than 20 cities, supported by regional Designer Advocates who gather feedback and help organize events. Figma’s goal is to build communities around members’ real local needs—not just product tips and workflows.
## From Meetups to Local Communities
- Design System Meetups sparked deeper conversations about:
- Running effective design critiques
- Open design culture
- Everyday challenges and successes
- New professional partnerships
- The events showed Figma that its community wanted more opportunities for in-person connection.
- Local Communities launched in cities including Accra, Amsterdam, Berlin, Boston, Copenhagen, Lagos, London, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Tel Aviv.
## A Community Shaped by Local Needs
- Cities were selected based on factors such as:
- Existing Figma evangelists and meetup organizers
- Concentrations of Figma users
- Geographic diversity
- Communities are intended to support learning, networking, and sharing beyond basic Figma instruction.
- Members can suggest workshops, pitch events, or request a new community in their city through an online form.
## Regional Designer Advocates
Figma created three Designer Advocate roles to support communities across different regions and time zones:
- **Tom Lowry — North America**
- Previously a senior UX designer at OpenText.
- Created Figma tutorials, component architecture guidance, and the Material Design resource kit.
- Also taught an online course about building design portfolios.
- **Zach Grosser — Europe**
- Former communications designer at Square, where he created executive presentations and the IPO roadshow deck.
- Introduced Figma to Square’s design team in 2013.
- Joined Figma to support design education after becoming an early product adviser and moving to Amsterdam.
- **Namnso Ukpanah — Africa**
- Organized a Lagos design systems meetup that attracted more than 300 designers and developers.
- Helped onboard 21 Figma ambassadors across 11 cities and seven countries.
- Continued this community work while serving as lead designer at Hotels.ng.
## Community Participation
- Designer Advocates act as Figma’s local representatives and help turn community ideas into events.
- Figma encouraged members to propose topics such as:
- Hiring diverse design teams
- Speed networking for freelancers and organizations
- Workshops and other city-specific events
- The program remained open-ended, with Figma relying on local participants to identify what their communities needed most.
Figma’s recommendation is to participate actively: share ideas, propose events, or help establish a Local Community where one does not yet exist.
