From Figma Handoff to FigJam Brainstorms: Our Top 10

All of the internal votes are in. With over 200 updates shipped across Figma and FigJam this year, narrowing our favorites down to ten was no easy feat, but these are the features that have earned their titles in the arena of day-to-day design and development workflow. From material changes to design systems infrastructure to lightweight quality-of-life fixes, the most valuable players for 2023 are the ones that save time, boost efficiency, and add an extra layer of polish.

See It Before You Set It

The era of the mystery font picker is over. Figma has introduced on-canvas previews for the font picker in 2023. Now, getting a feel for your design’s typography is as easy as a simple mouse move over your choice of over a thousand typefaces. No longer do you have to commit to a font and go through the whole cycle of selecting, finding it, and toggling it on your sticker sheet before plotting your way through three different versions.

The Benevolent Text Tamer

This next update might just save developers hours of pixel-hunting. For all the curiosities about main components and altering a build, this feature drops a much more direct view. Whether you’re trying to track down a padding or reviewing the changes since your last visit to the file, the answer is more accessible too. For those using Figma on the Professional plan or higher, the updated component details modal links out to your main library, and the interactive playground gives you a dedicated space to run through the ropes on variants, properties, and variable modes. Say hello to a more efficient handoff where you can test out or make freedom of experimentation a breeze without landing in a pinboard of lines.

Dynamic and Agile Semantics

If variables were high on your wishlist in past years, 2023 was the year they finally became mature for production. Launching first with support for color, numbers, strings, and booleans, variables now also extend to effects, stroke weight, layout grids, corner radius, and layer opacity. From the start, that was enough to inject new levels of agility into maintained design systems. More recently, you get even more literal in terms of scale: variables can now attach not just to the main component but right on a specific instance. With a more semantic system, the day-to-day management overhead for keeping design and code in sync gets materially lighter for design system managers, and prototyping gets another dose of momentum.

Bits and Bops for Every Handoff

Keep your code comments to the side. With the beta launch of Dev Mode, we kicked off an entirely new approach to moving designs to production in 2023. It’s a workspace built around the developer to reduce and answer those pesky questions that always come up: paddings and layers, specificity, and what changed since the last check. The run through flows and symbols makes for better-informed devs, with quick access to what you need in the format you consume. As a follow-up, we stacked hundreds of new capabilities onboard, marking a true overhaul to the entire handoff workflow. Better dev tools in a space entirely for you to enter, inspect, and ship.

Community-Fit Templates

Sweating through your winter planning session? Lay down your old decks for these. FigJam templates have gotten fully customizable to your crew’s needs. That means you can edit your template structure to better fit with your workflow signals, holding that hidden doc you have on repeat and fitting the format for sprint sync, retros, and more. Your own aesthetic is maintained in a click-out copy of the template that prevents you from starting from scratch. Save your team the extra pivot right to a slick template to dive right in and get your work organized.

The Ideator, a.k.a. FigJam AI

Fancy blockbusters at the ready. No blank canvas will ever need to be scary again. Thanks to our AI-enabled tools in FigJam, you’ve now got additional leverage when you are staring down a blank file at the start of a brain dump. Ready to bucket those stickies or enhance your favorite layout, FigJam AI steps in with custom creations. A running template or a series of generated outcomes is no problem. According to Noah Levin, VP of Product Design, these additions supercharge FigJam as a "brainstorming partner that helps you get to next steps faster." Whether creating generated boards for a timeline or synthesizing your meeting notes into digestible bullets, the first step is easy this year.

The Layout Listener: A Necessary Framing

We think proper kerning is exhilarating too, but auto layout might just get the gold. The beloved feature has quickly become auto layout wrapping to help support more intricate design demands. This system applies min and max height and width that free us from jumping through the many obstacles that used to be part of devs' modular upkeep. Design advocate Miggi Cardona’s own adoration caps it up better than we can: "Auto layout wrapping has to be my favorite drop of this year." Most useful for your widely redeployed components, it’s suitable for mobile browser views or multi-size adventures.

Time-Shifting Design Replication

The undo — a.k.a. Command+Z — got a worthy successor in “select and copy from the Version History” this year. For instance, maybe you deleted that container style you still need, or just need to cherry-pick a specific flow from a more polished phase. Grab what you need directly from an older sweep in history, whether that’s reconstructing an entire flourish or pulling that headline arrangement back into the current page, no more canvas digging or file duplicating required.

The Save-The-Day Scroller

Hello to perhaps the most charming segment of our list: Sticky over static. Forgiving user flows where some UI nests into place is gone?

The Web called up a winner when sticky headers successfully baked into a flow back in March. The release won over dedicated friends of that app, one @GregHuntoon, who offered the perfectly gleeful praise, "Thank the lord baby Jeebus in heaven above!" We’ve evolved beyond single stashing, when what's needed— layers of elements. That means a single scrolled item gets all the glory and code follows according to our action in a smoother multi-item response. Long-patches or an arranged header stay anchored to reduce a regular setup to nearly seamless. Everything top docked applies dynamic fix while still letting the inner loop and props repurpose.

The Clean Cut

We have strong opinions about typography on the canvas. That's why leading trim — the ability to cut away extra space above and below text — is one of our favorite additions this year. It brings text alignment closer to pixel-perfect, even if we can't control the stars.

Looking back at the year, it isn't just about the features we shipped. It's about how they land in daily workflows, from teachers using visual tools to make classrooms more inclusive to design teams producing world-class work. The tools are a means to connect, collaborate, and create — and we believe they should be fun as well. Keep the feedback coming as we head into 2024.

For a fuller picture, see Figma's 2023 Handoff.

Jenny Xie is a writer and editor at Figma, author of the novel Holding Pattern, and a former Executive Editor at Dwell. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Esquire, and elsewhere.

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