Embracing the tension between code and design
New features that bring the best of both worlds to design systems in Figma
Form design
A very digestable guide from Geri Reid on building forms. Not the code, but the design and UX principles that should guide the code.
Designing For Attention — Smashing Magazine
We must effectively design to gain and hold users’ attention in order to have them use our digital products. In this article, Victor Yocco covers specific tactics with supporting research that are bound to help you design for attention. He also discusses the need to understand why we want to gain users’ attention as well as what our users’ needs are.
Setting up and Customizing the Ant Design System in a Nuxt App
I don’t typically work with UI libraries because they can be cumbersome and hard to override, which can contribute to a bloated. However, Ant Design has
Designing With Reduced Motion For Motion Sensitivities — Smashing Magazine
Thanks to the wide support of the prefers-reduced-motion-media feature, we now have more advanced ways to design motion that can be creative and innovative while also being safer for those with motion sensitivities.
Figma’s new EMEA HQ
We're opening an office in London to better support users in EMEA
Supercharging Number Inputs
Speaking of number scrubbing (i.e. adding mouse UX to number inputs), you can also add better keyboard commands to number inputs. Kilian Valkhof explains how
Making Design Within Reach for online shoppers
Bringing the brick-and-mortar experience online
4 Ways To Creatively Use Icons In Your Mobile Apps — Smashing Magazine
Icons have long held an important place in the design of mobile apps. But beyond using them to create larger and more attractive touch targets, there are other ways mobile app designers can use these tiny elements to make an app more engaging. This post will explore four ways to do this. Today, Suzanna Scacca will look at a number of ways you can creatively add icons or icon-like elements to your
Creating multi-brand design systems
Learnings about building and maintaining design systems
September In All Its Facets (2020 Wallpapers Edition) — Smashing Magazine
New month, new wallpapers! In this post, Cosima Mielke brings you wallpaper designs for September 2020, created with love by the design community for the community. All of them are available in versions with and without a calendar and can be downloaded for free. A big thank-you to everyone who shared their artworks with us — we sincerely appreciate it!
Enterprise, explained
A behind-the-scenes look at Figma’s enterprise product team
Doom Damage Flash on Scroll
The video game Doom famously would flash the screen red when you were hit. Chris Johnson not only took that idea, but incorporated a bunch of the UI from Doom
How To Help Your Clients Get More Backlinks Through Design — Smashing Magazine
A website earns a backlink whenever another website links to it. But there’s a big difference between a backlink and a high-authority backlink. If an authoritative website links to yours, it can significantly boost your ranking in Google search. And this is why backlinks are so highly sought after in marketing… and why web designers should have this on their radar as they design websites for clien
To grid or not to grid
Sarah Higley does accessibility work and finds that "tables and grids are over-represented in accessibility bugs."
Inspired Design Decisions With Bradbury Thompson: The Art Of Graphic Design — Smashing Magazine
After 12 inspiring articles, Andy Clarke draws his Inspired Design Decisions series to a close by explaining how studying the work of Bradbury Thompson — one of the masters of 20th Century graphic — will teach you how to combine graphic and typographical elements with innovative layouts to create stunning designs for the web. In this final article, Andy brings together lessons from all his previou
Community Resources, Weekly Newsletter, And Boosting Skills Online — Smashing Magazine
Alongside our guides, printed books, eBooks and printed magazine, we’re thrilled to have yet another addition to our smashingly cherished gems: meet our brand new [Interface Design Patterns Checklists](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/08/checklist-cards-release/). Co-founder of Smashing Magazine, Vitaly Friedman, has been collecting, curating and refining each checklist for years — we’re conv
How we use Figma templates to facilitate collaboration at Shopify
A framework for project managing in Figma
Explore the Figma Community
Six creators share the inspiration behind their files
GMTK Game Jam 2020 – staff picks
The fourth annual GMTK Game Jam has broken it’s previous year’s record! GMTK Game Jam is a 48-hour game-making competition focused on design, mechanics, and clever ideas. The competition has just…
Can You Design A Website For The Five Senses? — Smashing Magazine
Imagine if your website could evoke this kind of response. Visitors who respond to the sensory stimulation would instantly be in a more positive headspace, which they’d then associate with the site and your brand. While you don’t want to design a website for all five senses — because that would most certainly lead to sensory overload — you can use individual senses to strengthen the experience vis
The Renaissance Of No-Code For Web Designers — Smashing Magazine
Just like during the Renaissance, we’re living in times of incredible cultural and artistic innovation. As the Internet evolves, browsers align, capabilities are added and accessibility of technology becomes easier, designers face new opportunities to create, think, and change their status with no-code tools. In this article, Uri Paz presents some tools that allow non-programmers to create applica
Inspired Design Decisions With Emmett McBain: Art Direction As Social Equity — Smashing Magazine
Emmett McBain was a Black American graphic designer whose work had a remarkable impact on the representation of Black Americans in advertising. He co-founded what became the biggest Black-owned agency in the USA. McBain designed almost 75 record covers by the time he was 24, and in the penultimate of his Inspired Design Decisions series, Andy Clarke will explain how his work can inspire what we de
Memorize Scroll Position Across Page Loads
Hakim El Hattab tweeted a really nice little UX enhancement for a static site that includes a scrollable sidebar of navigation.
How BT, a 174-year-old company, continues to push the telecommunication industry forward
Learn how designers, product owners, content designers, and engineers all collaborate in Figma to drive innovation.
Inspired Design Decisions With Giovanni Pintori: Publicity Becomes An Art Form — Smashing Magazine
In the tenth issue of Inspired Design Decisions, Andy Clarke will explain how Giovanni Pintori — the Italian graphic designer best known for his work with Olivetti — can inspire design for the web with his distinctive use of color and shape. Andy will teach you how to use color to attract attention and then to lead someone’s eye around a design. He’ll discuss how a minimal color palette can act as
How to evaluate design tools
A framework for project managing, testing, and choosing a design tool, based on what we’ve heard from our users.
What Vitruvius Can Teach Us About Web Design — Smashing Magazine
The ancients can teach us a thing or two about design — even web design. The Roman architect Vitruvius had buildings in mind when laying out his golden triad, but its principles are just as applicable to the web as they are to brick and mortar. Today’s article is about architecture, and how some of its core tenets apply to the worldwide web. Architectural terms are not unusual in web development,
Solving Common Cross-Platform Issues When Working With Flutter — Smashing Magazine
When using cross-platform frameworks, people might forget the nuances of each of the platforms they want their code to run on. This article aims to address that. Today, Carmine Zaccagnino is going to see some of those differences and how to overcome them. More specifically, he’re going to talk about storage and UI differences, which are the ones that most often cause confusion to developers when w
Mirage JS Deep Dive: Using Mirage JS And Cypress For UI Testing (Part 4) — Smashing Magazine
UI or User Interface test is a form of acceptance testing done to verify the user flows of your front-end application. The emphasis of these kinds of software tests is on the end-user that is the actual person who will be interacting with your web application on a variety of devices ranging from desktops, laptops to mobile devices. In this final part of Mirage JS Deep Dive series, Kelvin Omereshon
Beyond mocks: co-designing journeys, diagrams, and more
A look inside how Segment’s product design team co-designs with researchers, product managers, and engineers.
Is Your Website Stressing Out Visitors? — Smashing Magazine
Stress isn’t just something that makes people feel uncomfortable. It stimulates the urge to “fight” or “flight”. The very last thing you want is to design a website that stresses visitors out, leading them to dread the experience or abandon it entirely. There are many things that might invoke this response from your visitors, including the design. In the following guide, we’re going to look at som
Equivalent Experiences: Thinking Equivalently — Smashing Magazine
Constructing an equivalent experience may mean changing the way you think about development and design, and potentially reevaluating your existing work. In this article, Eric Bailey will discuss learning how to embrace an equivalent, inclusive mindset. He will also provide practical, robust ways to improve your websites and web apps by providing solutions to common, everyday barriers cited by the
How To Test A Design Concept For Effectiveness — Smashing Magazine
Getting a client or stakeholder to approve a design concept can be challenging. However, testing can make it easier, as well as ensuring you have the right solution. In this post, Paul Boag will explore some of the advantages testing design concepts can provide to us as designers, and demonstrate that you can do it cheaply and without slowing down the delivery of the overall project. Let’s begin!
The Best Design System Tool is Slack
There's a series of questions I’ve struggled with for as long as I can remember. The questions have to do with design systems work: Where should we document
The making of Maker Week
An inside look at one of our favorite Figma traditions
The GitHub Support Community has a new look and feel!
We’ve given the GitHub Support Community a major upgrade with a number of benefits: built using open-source, great Markdown support, more responsive design, and so much more.
Framer Web
The prototyping app Framer just launched the web version of their design tool and it looks pretty darn neat. I particularly love the design of the marketing
Inspired Design Decisions With Max Huber: Turning Mundane Subjects Into Exciting Visual Communication — Smashing Magazine
These days, product companies seem more interested in refining interfaces and simplifying user experiences. In this ninth issue of Inspired Design Decisions, Andy Clarke will explain how studying the work of Max Huber — one of the less well known but most distinguished Swiss designers — will teach you how to turn mundane subjects into exciting visual communication.
Radio Buttons Are Like Selects; Checkboxes Are Like Multiple Selects
I was reading Anna Kaley's "Listboxes vs. Dropdown Lists" post the other day. It's a fairly straightforward comparison between different UI implementations of
Bringing live Figma embeds to your team’s favorite tools
Now, you can embed private Figma files into Notion, Dropbox Paper, Jira, and more.
Can Data Visualization Improve The Mobile Web Experience? — Smashing Magazine
Since more and more web traffic comes from mobile users, our websites need to be in the best position to serve them. The easiest thing to do would be to remove unnecessary content from the site. However, it may not always be the best solution. In this article, Suzanne Scacca proposes some ways to turn essential content into graphics to conserve space, create a more engaging UI and preserve the ove
Finding design inspiration at home
Tips from the Figma design team on how to spark creativity at home.
How to pair design (and convince your boss to invest in it)
An introduction to design pairing, how to structure it, and tips for convincing your boss that it’s a good idea.
Reducing Design Risk — Smashing Magazine
The pressure to rush market and usability research carries risk. In this article, Eric Olive will offer four practical techniques to mitigate this risk and create designs that better serve customers and the company: context over convenience, compromise, better design decisions, design reduction.
How our product design team works
A look at the meetings, rituals, and exercises our product design team relies on to stay connected and efficient.
Figma’s Series D round
Figma announces Series D funding led by Peter Levine and Marc Andreessen at a16z.
Bridge design and development with the new Zeplin integration
Introducing a redesigned Zeplin integration with Figma.
How To Succeed In Wireframe Design — Smashing Magazine
Today, as designers, we are lucky as never before because there are dozens of tools available for us to design wireframes and also smoothly integrate this activity in our general design process. In this article, Anton Suprunenko will take a deeper look at one of the most simple yet quite often underrated activities in web development: the design of wireframes. You’ll learn what wireframes are, why
The case for lightweight prototyping
Some tried and true ways to use prototypes, and an unexpected use case from the Figma team.
Domain Driven Design
How Inneract Project empowers the next generation of brown and black designers
Students' stories and what they built in Figma.
How To Create A Compelling Landing Page — Smashing Magazine
A landing page is a standalone webpage created to support a specific marketing campaign or targeting a particular search term. They are where users “land” when they click a link in search results, email or an ad. In this article, Paul Boag will show you how to create a compelling landing page, which involves a combination of clear focus, persuasive copy, considered design and relentless testing. W
11 activities in Figma for your classroom
Hands-on exercises for learning design.
Figma + Lambda School: Where the remote classroom comes together to learn
Collaborative, interactive lessons inspire a new generation of design professionals
Environment Variables UI
Configure different Environment Variables for Production, Preview, and Development – right in the Dashboard.
Building on our open platform: Design in Figma, prototype with Framer
Learn more about our new integration with Framer.
Baking Structured Data Into The Design Process — Smashing Magazine
All search engines share the same purpose: to organize the web’s content and deliver the most relevant, useful results possible to search queries. How they achieve this has changed enormously since the days of Lycos and Ask Jeeves. Google alone uses more than 200 ranking factors, and those are just the ones we know about. Retrofitting search engine optimization only gets you so far. As metadata ge
Releasing The Ethical Design Handbook When We Needed It Most — Smashing Magazine
Early this month, [The Ethical Design Handbook](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/printed-books/ethical-design-handbook/) joined the Smashing Library of essential books for designers and developers. Changes around the world have meant changes in the book release, but readers love it so far! Ethical Design principles are timeless and we are seeing the results of that during an unprecedented time of
How Students Who Design set up Figma in their online classroom
Learn how SWD onboards students, organizes files, teaches classes, and provides project feedback with Figma for their online courses.