Liquid Glass & 3D in Hana

A big Hana (part of Spline) update was just released. You can now use 3D projections, liquid glass effects, auto layout, and video layers. Making the animation tool even more powerful.

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Jitter Pen tool & morph animations

Jitter has a brand-new pen tool that lets you draw custom shapes and transition between two shapes via morph animations.

Read about Jitter's latest update

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Animated intro video from Jitter showcasing the new pen tool and morph animations. It showcases shapes that change between different variants, text that animates from light to bold and an animated face that changes emotions.
Animation from Jitter's release notes

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Magic Animator

The first public beta of Lottielab's Magic Animator is now available, giving you a tool to generate animations based on any Figma selection. Great for creating animated mockups or marketing materials. After generating something, you are able to tweak it in Lottielab to fit your own vision.

Try out Magic Animator

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Blend modes in LottieFiles

LottieFiles for After Effects and Figma now support blend modes. You can choose out of 11 blend modes, including Multiply, Screen, and Overlay.

Read about more about blend modes

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A screen recording of the Figma interface showing an image with clouds and 2 circles that have different blend modes applied. The LottieFiles plugin is opened after selecting some frames and automatically animates between the frames while applying the blend modes.
Animation from LottieFiles' release notes

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Color contrast on gradients & images

Stark was always a great option to check the contrast of your design. It's now also built into the Figma color picker, so you might not have to use the contrast checker in Stark for a while. But it has some features that are quite useful. With the latest version, you can check the contrast against images or gradients, so no "hacks” are needed where you color drop some parts of a gradient or image and use rectangles to test against. This is also a great first step to support Liquid Glass designs, where you won't have full control over the background.

Read more about color contrast in Stark

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Screenshot of the Stark Contrast Checker plugin showing 2 options "Average" and "'Tresholds" while checking the contrast of white text on an photo of a Japanese garden. Treshold shows sliders to show how much of the image is above the contrast ratio in percentage. Average will look at all the average colors in the picture and gives a single contrast score.
Visual from Stark's blog

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Figma grids & Sites updates

Figma released some quality-of-life updates for grids and Sites. You can now delete rows and columns, resize a grid with a min/max setting, and edit multiple grids at once.

Sites now support custom subdomains; you previously got assigned a random subdomain, but now you can choose your own myawesomewebsite.figma.site domain.

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View on Threads

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Framer Link Decorations

Link Styles have been redesigned, giving you the option to decorate however you want your looks to look or behave. You can change color, style, thickness, offset, and more.

Read more about link decorations

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Graintouch

Looking for a new iPad drawing tool? Graintouch lets you create vector drawings with ink like textures. So unlike Procreate where you can only create bitmap drawings, these ones can be reused in all sorts of projects. It does however only come with a limited color palette to match the drawing style of Risograph.

Learn more about Graintouch

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