Plugins | Techlist.io

figmaApr 15, 20202 min readCurated summary

Look no further: New ways to search and provide context in Figma | Figma Blog

Figma’s 2020 updates aimed to make collaborative design work easier to discover and understand. Universal Search lets users find projects, teams, people, plugins, and files without relying only on file names. Links in the editor let designers connect pages, frames, and external documents, making files easier to navigate and providing more project context. ## Universal Search - Figma introduced workspace-wide search to address the difficulty of finding work as teams and content grow. - Users can search for: - Files - Projects - Teams - People - Private plugins - Results appear across categories as users type and can be filtered by category. - For users in the Figma Community beta, results also include community files, publishers, and plugins. - The feature builds on Figma’s shift toward organizing work around people, teams, and projects rather than only folders and file names. ## Links for Navigation and Context - Designers can add links to any page or frame within a Figma file. - Internal links can support navigation aids such as: - Clickable tables of contents - Indexes of design explorations - Pointers to the latest designs or early concepts - External links can connect designs to product requirement documents, specifications, user research, personas, and other project resources. - This allows a Figma file to serve as a central source of truth rather than an isolated design artifact. Together, Universal Search and Links make Figma workspaces easier to search and design files easier to navigate. Teams can spend less time locating assets and more time collaborating with the context needed to make informed decisions.

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Plugins Figma Design Collaboration Web Applications+1

figmaJan 8, 20202 min readCurated summary

Bringing the community together in Figma | Figma Blog

Figma’s 2020 priorities centered on strengthening its global community as the company and user base expanded. The company planned to connect users through in-person events, improved support, collaborative product features, and a richer platform for sharing design resources. Its broader goal was to make design more accessible and collaboration more effective for entire product teams. ## More Opportunities to Meet in Person - Figma launched Config, its first user conference, in San Francisco on February 6, 2020. - The event emphasized community-created programming, including talks on open-source design, developing future designers, design confidence, and redesigning Chicago.gov. - Figma also planned more local events and user groups in cities around the world. - Users were encouraged to participate either in person or online, and community leaders could help organize events in their cities. ## Expanded Global Customer Support - More than 80% of Figma’s active users were outside the United States, while its support team primarily covered North American and European business hours. - Figma moved its support technology to Zendesk to better serve customers globally. - Planned improvements included: - A new Help Center for self-service product information - Community forums for peer-to-peer support - Streamlined internal processes for faster responses ## Product Features for Entire Teams - After launching features such as Plugins, Auto Layout, Smart Animate, OpenType support, and Design System Analytics in 2019, Figma promised a larger 2020 product roadmap. - The company would continue reducing repetitive design work and improving creative productivity. - Figma also aimed to better support engineers, product managers, and other members of product teams—not just designers. - Files at larger organizations averaged six collaborators, highlighting the importance of team-based workflows. ## Building a More Open Design Community - Figma introduced the beta of Figma Community in October 2019 to let creators publish files for others to inspect, remix, and learn from. - More than 300 creators had already shared around 600 files, including templates, educational guides, and public libraries. - In 2020, Figma planned to expand the number of contributors and resources so both professional and aspiring designers could discover ideas and learn from shared work. Figma’s roadmap combined product development with community-building: expanding events, improving global support, enabling broader team collaboration, and making shared design resources easier to discover and reuse.

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Plugins Figma Design Systems Auto Layout+4

figmaOct 21, 20192 min readCurated summary

Beyond multiplayer: Building community together in Figma | Figma Blog

Figma argues that design is becoming more open, collaborative, and community-driven beyond real-time multiplayer editing. It introduces the Figma Community, where people can publish live files for others to inspect, remix, and learn from, alongside a redesigned workspace focused on team collaboration. The beta is intended to evolve through feedback from companies, educators, governments, and independent designers. ## From Multiplayer Collaboration to Public Sharing - Figma’s multiplayer features helped normalize co-editing and involving non-designers in the design process. - The company now wants to make it easier for designers to share not only finished work, but also the underlying process and methods. - The Figma Community beta provides a public space for publishing files that anyone can inspect, remix, and learn from. ## A Community Built with Customers - Users choose which files to publish on their public profiles. - The initial licensing option is Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, with more restrictive licenses potentially added later. - Figma describes the release as a multi-month beta designed to gather feedback and discover how organizations will use the platform. ## Use Cases Across Organizations - **Slack:** Publishing UI kits to help partners build better Slack applications. - **Dropbox:** Sharing culture kits for design managers. - **Unsplash:** Providing avatars and visual assets for designers. - **VMware:** Making its Clarity public design system easier to use. - **City of Chicago:** Offering a public design system that citizens can remix with their own identity. - **Lambda School and Stanford d.school:** Publishing free educational templates. - **Independent designers:** Sharing presentation templates, portfolios, tutorials, and source files. - **Square Crypto:** Exploring transparent, cross-company design collaboration inspired by the openness of the Bitcoin community. ## Learning Through Inspectable Files - Designers can publish editable source files rather than only screenshots or finished exports. - David Kulakevich’s Figma artwork demonstrates how viewers can inspect individual layers and learn the techniques behind a finished piece. - This turns community sharing into both a portfolio platform and an educational resource. ## Communities Inside the Workspace - Figma is also redesigning workspaces around the people on a team. - The goal is to make important files and projects easier for team members to discover. - This reflects Figma’s broader view that design files should be organized around collaboration and community, not treated as isolated artifacts. Figma’s recommendation is effectively to treat design as an open, reusable medium: publish useful files, learn from others’ source material, and build shared systems across organizational boundaries.

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Plugins Figma Design Systems Real Time Collaboration+2

figmaJul 30, 20192 min readCurated summary

Behind the Plugins: Jackie Chui, UX Designer @ Microsoft | Figma Blog

Jackie Chui, a UX designer on Microsoft’s PowerApps team, combines design and coding to build tools that make designers more efficient. After exploring Figma’s API during a 2018 hackathon, he developed numerous plugins, including Find and Replace, Paste to Fill, and Button Resizer. His work reflects Figma’s broader goal of bringing designers and developers closer together through extensible design tools. ## From LEGO Building to UX and Code - Chui’s childhood interest in inventing with LEGO later translated into a passion for UX design. - He learned coding alongside design so he could build and test the products he envisioned. - He finds inspiration by studying other people’s work and connecting ideas across projects. ## Exploring Figma’s API - Chui began experimenting with Figma’s platform more than a year before the interview. - His first plugin project came from Microsoft’s 2018 OneWeek Hackathon, where his team explored accessibility features for design tools. - Discovering API functions that could simulate user actions sparked his interest in plugin development. - He praised Figma’s official API as easy to use and stable. ## Plugins for Faster Design Work - His most anticipated community plugin was **Find and Replace**. - Other projects included: - **Paste to Fill** - **Button Resizer** - Numerous additional productivity tools for Microsoft and the wider Figma community - His goal was to help designers work faster and smarter while encouraging others to build their own tools. ## Building Figma Plus - Chui’s proudest project was **Figma Plus**, which began as browser-only Chrome extensions. - Community feedback revealed that users wanted the tools to work in Figma’s desktop application. - Working with Mirko Santangelo and Ahmad Al Haddad, he expanded the project into a complete platform featuring: - Its own API - A plugin store - A publishing process - The project’s development prepared the team to participate in Figma’s official plugins beta. ## The Future of Design and Development - Chui expects designers and developers to work more closely as design tools increasingly bridge the gap between their workflows. - Because Figma became Microsoft’s primary design tool, building on its platform was a natural way to improve his team’s process and contribute to the broader community. - His plugins were scheduled to become publicly available with Figma’s plugin launch on August 1, 2019. Figma’s plugin ecosystem demonstrates how designers with coding skills can extend their tools, automate repetitive tasks, and create shared solutions for the wider design community.

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Plugins Figma User Experience Accessibility+3

figmaJul 24, 20192 min readCurated summary

Behind the Plugins: Yitong Zhang, Product Designer @ Coinbase | Figma Blog

Yitong Zhang, a product designer at Coinbase, discusses how design can shape product strategy and address problems earlier in development. He is building a Figma plugin that quickly connects objects with lines to create user flows. His broader view is that designers should move beyond execution, contribute to defining problems, and focus increasingly on systems, strategy, and ethical outcomes. ## Building an Auto Flow Plugin - Zhang’s plugin uses the Figma API to connect any two objects with a line. - The goal is to make drawing user flows faster and easier. - He chose Figma because he enjoys the platform, considers its API strong, and sees Figma as the future of collaborative design. ## From Founder to Product Designer - Zhang entered technology as a startup founder who handled many different responsibilities. - After the startup failed, he pursued design work to support himself. - Design appealed to him because it preserved his favorite part of founding a company: imagining useful products into existence. - His prior experience with design tools came partly from creating anime fan art. ## Design as a Strategic Partner - Zhang is proud that Coinbase moved design beyond simply executing product requirements documents. - Designers now participate as equal partners in shaping product strategy. - He argues that designers should help define the problems they are asked to solve. - Strong execution cannot compensate for a fundamentally bad problem statement. - Early design involvement can lead to more effective, ethical, and impactful products. ## The Future of the Design Industry - Product designers will spend less time on pixel-level production. - Their work will increasingly involve system building and strategic definition. - Brand design is likely to become more distinct and important as technology companies recognize brand as a competitive advantage. - Zhang finds inspiration outside technology, recently looking to architecture for ideas about systems-level design. Designers can increase their impact by joining product discussions early, helping frame the right problems, and developing skills in systems thinking and strategy—not just visual execution.

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Plugins Figma Design Systems Product Design+1