What’s new recap: Component updates, plugins beta, and other goodies

The last three months have been busy here at Figma. We’ve made a ton of rapid improvements to Components, Smart Selection, and other features you use every day to work smarter. We dedicated ourselves to a quality week where we smashed a lot of bugs. And we launched the beta for Figma plugins, which is something that we have been working on behind the scenes for quite a long time!

In case you missed some of our announcements, here’s a round-up of what we released this past Spring:

Component updates to help scale your design systems

Components are core to how you and your fellow teammates create reusable designs faster. A huge focus for our team this last quarter was to make creating and managing Components easier. One of the goals was to address common feature requests. The other was simply to save you time. Here’s what’s new to Components in Figma:

• Create multiple Components in one click. Select as many objects as you want and turn them all into Components instantly.

• Right-click an instance and see related Components directly in the Context Menu. Easily swap with another instance.

• With the new Return to Instance button, navigate to your Master Component to reference or edit, and click to get back to the instance you were working on.

• [For your local components only] Make changes to an instance and push those overrides to the master Component—great for iterating on and updating local components efficiently.

For more info on how to use components, check out our Best Practice Guide on Components, Styles, and Team Libraries.

Introducing the Figma Plugins beta

Earlier this month, we announced the public beta of our plugin API. This is a project that the team has been working on for quite a long time. It has been amazing and humbling to see the incredible response from our community. What's even more incredible is what some of our customers are already starting to create in the beta. Here’s a sneak peek of what some of our first plugin creators are building:

Improve handoff workflows with developers

Collaboration is core to Figma’s product DNA. One of the key collaboration moments in the design process is working with your developers. This quarter, we focused on making sure your developers have all the context they need about your designs during the handoff process.

• See Component descriptions in the Code panel. Write useful notes to your developers, like instructions, exceptions, or GitHub URLs, for a more seamless hand-off.

• View new additions in the Code Panel, like text styles names and font feature settings. Help your developers understand what style and font settings to use when implementing your design.
• Interested in more tips on improving collaboration with developers? Check out our Tips for a Better Developer Workflow in Figma.

A forever-improving Editor that keeps up with you

We are always looking for ways to make the Editor faster and more useful to you. This quarter, we participated in a big quality week where we resolved 17 bugs. We also shipped a bunch of improvements to Smart Selection and our drawing tools.

• Easily delete and duplicate text, images, and objects using the updated Smart Selection feature. The surrounding objects automatically move to fill the void or make room for the new addition.

• We made a subtle, but important update to how Line Height is distributed and measured in an effort to bring Line Height to be more in line with Web standards.

And of course, we introduced new and improved shortcuts:

• Alt + 2 on a PC will now always allow you to search your Assets tab, even when the Assets tab is open
• Holding Shift in vector edit mode will now snap vector points to 45°
• Holding Shift while drawing an object will now automatically enable constrain     proportions

More control and visibility into user activity

For admins on Figma’s Organization plan, you now have more visibility into who’s using Figma and who isn’t, so you can make more informed user management decisions.

On the Members dashboard, you can review three new activity stats — date upgraded, last edit, last seen — that provide a snapshot of each user’s activity. Additionally, you can export a CSV with more attributes for further analysis.

To get the latest updates and announcements, follow @FigmaDesign on Twitter.