Design Thursday #13
A weekly recap of everything you need to know about tools, events, guidelines and design in general.
Webflow: Tiny But Mighty Product Updates
Webflow has been shipping a lot of very useful quality of life improvement to make working on projects easier than before. The latest addition is support for combo classes in the Figma plugin, it will take your layer name and create individual classes that can be combined. They also teased an upcoming Spline integration. You can find all 23 recent updated and 6 future updates in the Webflow: Tiny But Mighty Product Updates recap livestream.
Lottie x Figma
The Lottiefiles Figma plugin now lets you create and export Lottie animations. You can create your animation using prototyping and Smart Animate, the plugin will do the rest. This is especially useful for small animations that don’t need a lot of fine-tuning, or you can just use it as a concept placeholder for your final animation.
New Rive tools
Rive added 2 small, but great, new tools: Rotate (W) and Scale (E). This allows you to manipulate elements on the canvas a bit easier as you don’t have to type values anymore.
Apple Accessibility
Right before Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Apple announced some upcoming accessibility features for the next OS updates. It includes a focused UI mode called Assistive Access that will simplify the layout for people with a cognitive disability. It’s unclear if Apple will allow other apps to support this mode, something to look forward to at WWDC. You can find all other updates in their Newsroom article.
Framer
As always, Framer shipped plenty of updates: new text styles, an input component and a 2x performance improvement. The new text styles include H4-H6 styles, so you can better support web headings, all text styles are now optional, so you can style your website however you want. The input component allows you to capture text input and can integrate with a few services to sign up for a newsletter, for example. The latest update is a 2x performance update, that makes it faster to open projects and load published websites.
Jitter Copy+Paste
Jitter is a browser-based motion design tool that makes it easy to create motion graphics, social posts and more. They also allow exporting for Lottie, so you can use your animations in all different ways. They already had a Figma plugin, but now added support for copy and past. You can open the plugin, copy your selection in Figma and paste it in Jitter. Easy as that.
Figma Updates
Where to begin with Figma updates, they released some just a month before Config. Making it even more exciting to see what they will announce there. But let's start with what has been released so far.
State management
In the past, you could toggle an option in your prototype to maintain the scroll position when navigating to a different frame. This is now a default option, prototypes will always remember your scroll position. On top of that, interactive components will also remember their state, so a toggle will still be turned off if you did so in a part of the prototype. Videos will also be able to keep their current play time, so you get an app-like experience while testing prototypes.
Important: name your layers properly for this to work
You can find out more in this thread:
Memory tool
When working with large Figma files, you might have run into the memory tool. Telling you to clean up your file if you want to keep using it. This tool got a few improvements recently. It will now show you what is using a lot of memory, and you can also toggle an option to view it per page. This will make it easier to spot your memory hogging designs.
Read all about in this thread:
Design Systems Course
Figma released a 4 part “Introduction to Design Systems” course. Going in-depth, how to set up a design system and how to use it in your Figma files. It takes just 80 minutes, so no excuse not to have a refresher.
FigJam accessibility
FigJam now has screen reader support, making it finally an option to work together with people who rely on a screen reader. Figma also continues to improve keyboard navigation and input, so you don’t have to rely on a pointer device to use FigJam.
Find more about accessibility in FigJam
FigJam for iPad
As a final Figma update, FigJam was just released as a standalone iPad app. It was previously part of the Figma app, but can now be downloaded and used by itself.