Config 2022: Thinking big and acting with urgency | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Figma’s Config 2022 centered on the idea that designers and builders can influence major global and local challenges by thinking bigger and acting urgently. The 24-hour event brought together 100 speakers for 68 talks, while Figma introduced a broad set of product updates aimed at improving responsive design, collaboration, prototyping, and workflow integration.

Config’s Broader Mission

• Config connected a global design community spanning nearly every country.
• Dylan Field argued that creatives are not powerless in the face of issues such as economic inequality and climate change.
• The event encouraged attendees to use design and technology to create meaningful change, locally and globally.

Expanded Design and Prototyping Capabilities

• Dark mode became available on Figma’s desktop and web applications.
• Redesigned auto layout added more intuitive responsive-design controls, including absolute positioning and negative spacing.
• Variable font support enabled more expressive and optimized typography.
• Spring animations allowed designers to create more natural transitions in prototypes.
• Individual strokes made it possible to customize borders on specific sides of four-sided shapes.
• Updated outlines exposed hidden objects and bounding boxes across the canvas.

More Flexible Design Systems

• Component properties reduced the need for excessive variants.
• The feature also improved alignment between design systems and implementation code, supporting smoother developer handoff.
• Review states enabled teams to approve changes, request revisions, and provide contextual feedback through branching.

Collaboration and Workflow Integrations

• Spotlight allowed participants in multiplayer sessions to direct everyone’s attention to a specific collaborator.
• New FigJam widgets connected collaborative ideas with execution tools:
  • Jira
  • Asana
  • GitHub
• Additional FigJam widgets included greeting cards and voice memos for team celebrations.
• International keyboard shortcuts, initially in beta, improved shortcut support for German, Japanese, and French keyboards.

Sharing and File Management

• Password protection gave file owners more control over who could access shared files.
• Favoriting files made frequently used documents easier to find and access.

Figma positioned these updates as tools for making design work more responsive, collaborative, inclusive, and connected to broader product-development workflows. Teams can benefit most by adopting the features that strengthen their design systems, review processes, and collaboration practices.