Figma Blog

I recommend Figma for frontend design! https://www.figma.com/ One of key advantage is that it has Google-Doc-like collaboration features which will make communication with team members much easier down the line. Other features I like are: - it lets you define components similar to how you would structure your components when coding the frontend, which will help you develop a cohesive styleguide - you can create a clickable prototype which can help present your designs or for user testing If you've used other design software like Sketch or Adobe XD, then Figma is like an online version.

You're right, I completely forgot about Etherpad. But I don't consider Etherpad the same as Quilljs or ProseMirror. Etherpad is something you host (an app itself) while the other text editors are something you can build upon/integrate into your app. I didn't want to host an instance of Etherpad, I needed a library. I wanted an editing experience similar to Medium.com text editor: consistent, well-formed html output and formatting. At the time, Quilljs was one of the best open-source editor that produced consistent output regardless of the browser. Also I didn't want to store html, I wanted to store operations in the database. I have an app similar to Figma[1] (basically real-time Sketch) and I needed just the real-time text editing feature. [1] https://www.figma.com/

I love this! Genius! I personally use Figma (http://figma.com) - which is an incredible vector drawing tool!

I used to depend on OS X for Sketch and iOS dev, but with the release of Figma, that has changed quite a bit. I do hope that Figma would release an Linux app to use system fonts and allow for upload of slack files that use weird fonts for example. Apart from that (and iOS development), Linux is a perfect dev environment (ofc we still need a few more apps like a good gui git client - I use Fork on mac and I love it), but Gitkranen can be a situable alternative till a good client comes along. Seriously though, if someone is willing to offer XCode over the web, or even a cheap dedicated vm (most VMs i've seen are insanely expensive for what they provide), that'd be great Figma - https://www.figma.com Fork - https://git-fork.com/

Thanks. It's just plain JavaScript and some jQuery. It uses SVG so the browser takes on some of the work you'd have to do yourself with canvas, like having the shapes as their own element and detecting mouse events. This also makes it easy to export as SVG (just append .svg to the URL). Server stuff and a small backend runs on minimal PHP and MySQL, no frameworks. The data is stored in a JSON-based format. PNGs are generated from the SVG with ImageMagick. Keyboard shortcuts with jQuery.hotkeys. Could be more modularized to allow touch input, multiplayer editing, use as a library etc., thus the needed rewrite :> The endgame for this could be something like https://www.figma.com. They have collaborative editing, use canvas to completely do their own thing for graphics and React+Redux for the interface. Quite amazing.

Figma | Security Engineer | Remote or Hybrid (SF, NYC, Seattle) | https://figma.com | Full-Time, $149-350k + Equity Figma makes the tools that modern companies use to design apps. And because of that highly sensitive data, security is extremely important to get right. (If the next iPhone were designed using Figma and a breach leaked it... yeah, you get the point.) Anyway, I am on the security team over here at Figma and reminding the excellent HN folks that we're hiring. I'm primarily working on AI and Snowflake Security currently, but I've hopped around over the past year. You likely will too! We are a bit of a weird hybrid hiring-wise though. We need engineers with a security background than can _also_ write production-grade software. (If you are a regular SWE then please check out Figma Careers page for a better role to apply for. There are many open roles, though keep in mind that Figma tends to only hire at the "Senior" bar and up. Not very many junior folks here.) This is the link for my team if you're interested! Feel free to ping me at my email on my profile if you have questions. Cheers! https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/figma/jobs/4214880004?gh_jid=42148800…

Here is a thought you might want to consider and see if it makes sense. This is personal, but I also believe this is where design codes (especially CSS) are going to go. It is not going to be Tailwind or more new frameworks. Honestly, I think all of these Bootstrap, Foundation, and Tailwind, etc. are like middle-layer abstractions are for designs that are neither small nor large. Bootstrap won because of the out-of-the-box UI designs that looked nice overall, and so did Tailwind. By the way, I love Tailwind's color palette, and I continue to steal from it all the time. CSS (the actual raw CSS) has become so usable, easy and just works while browsers are so advanced these days, that I don't think we even need to reset/normalize/sanitize the styles. The tools we need will soon be the ones that will integrate directly with IDEs, akin to how the likes of Figma are going. Imagine a designer either does an overall design or works on modules of components or StyleTiles that are reflected in the CSS either on its own or part of the Javascript-ified HTML markups. When a developer changes something, it is reflected back to the designer's tool so that the designer also knows what changed. I believe this is where the AI-assisted ones will shine — their ability to bridge the relationship between the design and the code. The interface to interact with that can be the drawing tools (Photoshop, Affinity, Figma) for designers, prompts, or harry's wand (it does not matter). In fact, for…

Figma | Desktop Engineering Manager | SF, NYC or Remote in US | Full-time | https://www.figma.com/ | https://boards.greenhouse.io/figma/jobs/4803813004 As the Desktop Engineering Manager at Figma, you will lead the Desktop team responsible for creating the best way for daily Figma users to collaborate, create, and get work done with joy and efficiency through our macOS and Windows applications. You’ll work closely with your team (5 engineers), designers, PMs, and other EMs to enhance and extend our web products so they work seamlessly on desktop. You’ll also continue building the team so we have the right people to create the best desktop experience for our power users. The ideal leader for this role is excited about getting deep into the details and leveraging their team to bring the best of the web and desktop together. Contact: Apply at the JD link above, or reach out to [email protected] if you have any questions!

There is a lot of movement in the offline-first/multiplayer space at the moment, after apps like Linear [1] & Figma [2] have pushed the paradigms. [1]: https://linear.app [2]: https://figma.com Some other projects which will help you implement the pattern that are worth checking out: Replicache [3] - real-time sync for any backend. Works via simple push and pull end points and is built by a small team of 3 devs with decent browser xp (Greasemonkey, Chrome, etc) Logux [4] - a client/server framework for collaborative apps. From Evil Martians, well known for: postcss, autoprefixer, browserlist etc. [3]: https://replicache.dev [4]: https://logux.io RoomService also used to be in the space but recently left it to pivot to something else. The largest problem you’ll end up solving is conflict resolution so having a good understanding of the tradeoffs involved with your (or the underlying) implementation is key.

I'm creating an open source todo list + calendar webapp (https://getartemis.app, source at https://github.com/satvikpendem/artemis) made by just me, and I can tell you how I approached the problem. The video you see on the front page does not exist in code, it is simply a prototype designed with Figma (https://figma.com) and animated with Principle (https://principleformac.com). I created the landing page and video, added a Mailchimp form, and I posted on Twitter, Reddit, and here on Hacker News, the communities in which it made sense. For me, it's a productivity / task management tool, so I would post on reddit.com/r/getdisciplined or reddit.com/r/productivity. It's all about creating a minimum viable product, as you might well be aware, but what you may not know is that an MVP need not have code. Indeed, it could be a video as I did, and I think for software, a video works best as people can actually see what it looks and feels like, without you necessarily creating the product architecture (full frontend and backend plus devops etc). Now I have over 150 subscribers in only a month due to rapid creation of this type of MVP, and based on this feedback, I changed my designs, and only now I am beginning to really create the heart of the product. Using non-code MVPs is the best way in my opinion to sell quickly before building.

We use LWW on the attribute level which greatly reduces conflicts. There are certainly cases where you'll need a different CRDT but this works great for a lot of use cases. Including Figma! https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology-works/

There was a great presentation at the MCP Dev Summit last week explaining MCP vs CLI vs Skills vs Code Mode: https://www.figma.com/deck/H6k0YExi7rEmI8E6j6R0th/MCP-Dev-Summit---MCP…

Good readings: https://madebyevan.com/figma/ https://madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-design-tool-on-th… https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-by-3x/ (old but interesting still)

Hey HN! I’ve been working on a Figma plugin called Vector Image AI, and I’d love to share it with you all. It uses AI to generate custom SVG illustrations and icons directly in Figma based on simple text prompts. Here’s what it can do: - Generate unique, scalable SVGs in seconds. - Support a variety of styles like flat, outline, pastel, pop art, and more. - Seamlessly integrate into Figma—no need for exporting/importing. Would love your feedback—what works, what doesn’t, and any ideas for improvement! Check it out here: https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1440141868641854458/vector-imag… Thanks for taking the time to look!

The free tiers of https://linear.app/ and https://www.notion.so/ are pretty good. Combined with plugging your linear account into the VCS of your choice (probably github/gitlab/bitbucket). The free tier of https://www.figma.com/ is good for mockups and design.

Hi, you can try this plugin to get email HTML from the Figma. https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1305869752760258922/kombai-html… It is algorithmic and it will try to match your Figma exactly using email specific HTML code as opposed to generative AI. Also it does not have any preconditions like Auto Layout. Just put your email in a Frame. Hopefully, it will at the least get you started. Would love to get your feedback. Disclaimer: I work here.

I remember when I first read this blog post, https://www.figma.com/blog/how-we-built-the-figma-plugin-system/. Besides now feeling a bit old realizing this was 5 years ago, I remember thinking what an amazing engineering culture they must have at Figma (besides having a bunch of brilliant people). I mean, they talked about essentially trying out a tech path for a month and then deciding that path was a dead end - I find this so rare in startups where there is a lot of pressure to continually demonstrate "progress". As a corollary, though, I think those kinds of cultures are only possible if your team is composed of primarily brilliant people, because these brilliant people can move faster than most competitors even if they do wander down an unproductive path for a while, and there is total trust that the folks on your team are capable and self-motivated.

Still continuing to work on https://non.io, which I kinda accidentally launched on hackernews around 9 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296695 TL;DR elevator pitch: subscription based reddit-like platform. Your subscription is split evenly between everything you upvote that month. Nonio takes $1 out of your subscription to pay for servers. One thing I found from the launch was there was a huge volume of mobile users, who didn't have a great experience. I hired a dev to help work on an iOS app for this, which we're building in the open. Designs: https://www.figma.com/file/im8a7L7axmbj0S0lm27NKa/Nonio-iOS-App?type=d… Code: https://github.com/jjcm/nonio-ios

Nice project! I love Calibre's functionality, but I too was kind of frustrated by its UI and started designing an interface that kind of looks like a mixture of pre-Apple-Music iTunes and iBooks. I only created one screen so far, but feel free to take a look: https://www.figma.com/file/m8qaYbPSnxiFPDPbuYtz2w/Calibre-redesign?typ… My main question was, how could Calibre's main functionality be presented in a UI that feels native to macOS? Since this doesn't try to be cross-platform, I might try to build this as a SwiftUI app with your Rust backend if I find the time. Kudos on actually publishing this! It might be hard to maintain something that keeps up with Calibre's development, but it sure seems like a fun hobby project :)

This looks great! I'm no designer, so I always appreciate seeing other folks' ideas on how to design things. To shout out some other inspiration, there have been a few Calibre redesign projects. In particular, Kemie Guaida[1]'s redesign posted to Reddit has been a major design inspiration (and she deserves credit on the repo, which I will address shortly): https://old.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/udzumn/testing_a_new_interfa… You're able to see the entire overview of the project here: https://www.figma.com/file/g4ntqXWa6C0PRGrG3WjyXM/Calibre-prototype-re… [1]: https://kemielikes.design/

You may not need CRDT per-se, but building a collaborative experience is so difficult. I worked on collaborative systems for a bit, and also have read a bit about how Figma and Notion do it (this is a good read: https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology-works/) -- it's still super hard to get right. This talk by Karri about Linear's "sync engine" is also a good watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo2m3jaJixU.

Hey, I've wrote a few books (https://kerkour.com/books) with only markdown, https://excalidraw.com and https://figma.com I've detailed my complete setup and shared the Dockerfile that I use to convert the markdown into ebooks (EPUB, PDF and Kindle) on my blog: https://kerkour.com/book-self-publishing-pandoc

Lately for flowcharts I've been using Figma's Figjam. https://www.figma.com/figjam/ It's really an amazing tool. It's like a whiteboard that allows you to describe processes in different ways with contextual information (images, links, bits of code, etc). I've been working on a complicated feature for my current project and it has been invaluable. The only thing I'm missing is really a way to describe database models with relationships.

Figma has a great post on how they handled multi-player syncing using CRDT's. https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology-works/

This is significant because all previous iOS resources attempting this level of detail have been created by the design community. A designer named Joey Banks created widely adopted UI Kits for iOS 13-16[1]. Earlier iOS resources were created by an agency called Teehan+Lax[2] and some others I’m forgetting now. All community-created design resources have historically been really good best guesses. Now they’re available directly from Apple. Apple is letting design teams reveal what’s happening on the inside a little bit and this is one example. [1] https://www.figma.com/@joey [2] https://teehanlax.com/tools/

Figma is excellent at many things, but they struggle with accessibility. It's been a year since they wrote a blog post about their accessibility efforts so I don't know how far they've managed to solve the issues they identified - https://www.figma.com/blog/a-step-forward-in-our-accessibility-efforts…

Figma also went to great lengths to make it perform as well as it does. Doing something similar for Inkscape seems unlikely but who knows. https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-…

I think Figma's tutorials are a great way to start. There's something valuable about learning design as you learn how to use a design tool at the same time. https://www.figma.com/resources/learn-design/

Of course, when you phrase it as "only available in the browser" then there are no alternatives. That's why Figma had to "create a browser inside the browser" because the tech is just so, so amazing: https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-…

I thought this was a great read for a high-level overview of Figma's approach: https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology-works/