2020 is off to a big start. We’re kicking off with over 1000 Figma users at our very first conference, Config, in San Francisco. And this month, we’re announcing 7 new features to help designers create faster, enable product teams to collaborate as one unit, and give the entire design community more ways to share openly.
If you weren’t able to join us live at Config, you can watch (or re-watch) our product announcement below or read on for a summary of what’s new to Figma.
Where we’ll focus in 2020: creation, collaboration, community
This year we’re focused on evolving the Figma product in three key areas:
- Creation: Build innovative features that automate repetitive design work
- Collaboration: Be inclusive of everyone that’s part of the design process
- Community: Enable the design community to share and learn from one another
And of course, none of this matters without a reliable, high-performing platform, so that’ll forever be a foundational investment.
New tools to help you work faster and smarter
To remove unnecessary steps, clicks, and pixel-pushes, we’re introducing new features to speed up how you work with type, color, and spacing in Figma.
🆕 Since releasing our first version of Auto Layout just a couple months ago, we’ve been hard at work making it even more powerful. Driven by user feedback, Auto Layout can now be used to make responsive components which stretch to fill their containers, in addition to buttons which resize with their text and lists which can be easily rearranged. This is especially helpful when creating designs across multiple device types.
🔜 Figma comes with 1000+ pre-installed fonts; plus you can upload any custom fonts to use and share. While lots of options are great, scrolling through an endless list of fonts is not. The redesigned Font Picker now surfaces the fonts you use most—your organization’s shared fonts and your favorites—and allows you to quickly search through the rest. It also highlights all the fonts used in your file so you can ensure consistency across your designs.
🆕 Sometimes, you need to change the color of fills, strokes, and text independently. Other times, you just want them to be the same color. Selection Colors enables you to batch update colors across fills, strokes, and text in a click.
🔜 Prototyping plays a critical role in helping you iterate on your designs faster, allowing you to test your designs and collect quick and relevant feedback. To help you create higher fidelity prototypes, we’re adding prototype interactions for new devices such as keyboards, gamepads, and accessibility controllers. With these new triggers, you can prototype your application's keyboard shortcuts, like Cmd + F, or even video game menus with gamepad directional buttons.
New ways to collaborate as one product team
While shipping innovative features that boost creative productivity will always be at our core, we know that great products aren’t built alone. Working well as one product unit is critical to shipping products your customers will love. But sharing, communicating, and getting the right feedback is hard because context is so easily lost between teams, tools, and time zones.
🔜 To never lose context, you can now hyperlink any text to any page on the Web, any page within a file, or any frame in the Editor. For example, you may want to link to external resources, like a product requirements doc, or link to specific pages or frames to create a clickable table of contents that helps collaborators navigate your file.
🆕 To help connect the various tools you use throughout the design process, we’re introducing the new Plugin Inspector API. Developers can now update plugins to surface key information in the properties panel. Seeing a plugin like Notepad in the properties panel can highlight key action items. Or knowing that a plugin like Mapsicle was used to generate a map visual allows for easier updating.
🔜 Sharing your design work is key to communicating your ideas and getting buy-in, so we’ll continue to advance sharing capabilities. We’ve added a new sharing permission that lets you share a prototype without sharing the underlying design file, coming soon to the Figma Professional and Organization plans.
New channels to exchange ideas with the community
Lastly, we don’t want collaboration to be limited to just your team or organization. We want to enable you to share with and learn from the entire design community.
That’s why we introduced the beta of the Figma Community last October—to build a public space where our users can publish live design files that anyone in the world can inspect, remix, and learn from. Over the last few months, we’ve seen over 400 creators publishing over 1000+ files, like wireframe templates, icon sets, design system examples, device frames, slide templates, illustrations, and more.
Across the files published, we’ve seen useful UI resources, like Google’s Material Design UI Kit, Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code Toolkit, and Uber’s Base Gallery. But we’ve also been surprised by some incredibly creative files, like Gleb’s Pac Man game and アンドリュー’s DIY Magic: the Gathering Cards. We’ve also seen files that improve designer’s day-to-day workflow, like Ben Fryc’s Design Handoff Checklist and Ben Radcliffe’s Sticky Notes.
If you haven’t joined the beta, sign up here to publish files to your public profile and discover, duplicate, and remix any one of the 800 files now available in the Figma Community.
When you can get your hands on the new things
The new Auto Layout updates, Selection Colors, and Plugin Inspector API are available starting today. The new Font Picker, Hyperlinks, and the full roll-out of the Figma Community will be coming soon. We have so much more in store for this year. Stay tuned.
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