New ways to create, collaborate, and share more openly | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Figma’s 2020 product direction centers on three priorities: faster creation, more inclusive collaboration, and a broader design community. At Config 2020, the company announced seven features aimed at reducing repetitive work, preserving context across teams, and making design knowledge easier to share. These updates build on Figma’s focus on a reliable, high-performing platform.

Focus for 2020: Creation, Collaboration, and Community

• Creation: Automate repetitive design tasks and help users work faster.
• Collaboration: Include everyone involved in the product process.
• Community: Give designers more opportunities to publish, learn, and share.
• Platform reliability and performance remain foundational investments.

Faster Design Workflows

• Auto Layout improvements

  • Components can stretch to fill their containers.
  • Buttons resize automatically with their text.
  • Lists can be rearranged more easily.
  • These capabilities support responsive designs across device types.

• Redesigned Font Picker

  • Prioritizes frequently used fonts, organization fonts, and favorites.
  • Provides faster font search.
  • Identifies fonts already used in a file to improve consistency.

• Selection Colors

  • Allows fills, strokes, and text colors to be updated together in one action.
  • Also supports changing these color categories independently.

• Expanded prototype interactions

  • Adds triggers for keyboards, gamepads, and accessibility controllers.
  • Enables prototypes for keyboard shortcuts, game menus, and other device-specific interactions.

Collaboration Across Product Teams

• Text hyperlinks

  • Text can link to external web pages, pages within a Figma file, or frames in the Editor.
  • Useful for linking requirements documents and building navigable tables of contents.

• Plugin Inspector API

  • Lets plugins display important information in Figma’s properties panel.
  • Can surface action items or identify plugin-generated content, such as maps, for easier updating.

• Prototype-only sharing

  • A new permission allows users to share a prototype without exposing the underlying design file.
  • The feature was planned for Figma Professional and Organization plans.

Sharing with the Design Community

• Figma continued developing its Community platform as a public space for publishing live files.
• Community files can be inspected, remixed, and used for learning.
• Within its first months, more than 400 creators had published over 1,000 files, including wireframes, icon sets, design systems, device frames, slide templates, and illustrations.

Together, these updates position Figma as more than a design editor: it aims to become a faster creation tool, a shared workspace for product teams, and an open learning platform for the broader design community.