The difference between a bet and a strategy is hindsight

Has anyone figured out the ROI of liquid glass yet

I can’t stop thinking about how maybe semantic tokens should be a single mode A codified name to consolidate a cascade of (aliased) decisions - Light/dark are system changes - Brand is a change at the primitive level

Published a new plugin 🤖 "Import CSS shadows, create Figma styles" allows you to do just that. You can create variables too Recently I was building a UI kit from an existing website and rebuilding shadows from CSS was really slow, so built this! www.figma.com/community/pl...

New plugin published: batch rename variables It allows you to rename by: • Find & replace • Add prefix • Add suffix • Change case You can also revert any name changes. Should hopefully save a tonne of time! www.figma.com/community/pl...

I've updated the CSS variables Figma plugin! Noooow, you can export AND import CSS variables. Copy, paste, or upload a CSS file, and it will generate your variables including aliasing ◇ Hopefully makes variable migration a lot easier www.figma.com/community/pl...

Weirdly, I was thinking about "design systems limit my creativity" over the weekend and @donnie.damato.design drops this: blog.damato.design/posts/done-w... Innovation requires deviation, and locking down experimentation is where alignment fails. Maybe we don't need component arbiters anymore?

Enjoying playing around with opacity layering to try and reduce the amount of variables you need to support

Google’s search results page is an obstacle course

Registration is one of the first user experience contact points of your software, but a really neglected opportunity for delight

New cool color contrast picker on Figma

Figma's UI3 is now available to browse in the community ❖ www.figma.com/community/fi...

Performance is a feature

You don’t need a “design system” if quality is a non-negotiable company value

Sat down with the Figma team to talk about craft – what is it, how do we define it, and how can you get better at it? This is part of a mini series called Blend Mode, with two other videos on the design process and users coming out in the next few weeks www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXQZ...

Published a plugin! It allows you to copy CSS variables from Figma in either design or dev mode 🧑‍💻 www.figma.com/community/pl...

Aspect ratio is now live* on Figma 🙈 *rolling out today

What does the word "wireframe" mean to you? What level of fidelity is it?

Inclusive Sans, designed for accessibility and readability 👏 fonts.google.com/specimen/Inc...

Because Read.cv is shutting down, I'm moving all my blog posts (back) to Medium: medium.com/@disco_lu

Are design systems just internal support with a different label

The new Dropbox brand website is class 👏 Really like how it messes with conventional navigation patterns brand.dropbox.com

First blog of the year is about "staging component libraries" and how they can enable fast iteration of designs, prevent bottlenecks in design systems, and encourage experimentation read.cv/disco_lu/sta...

Polish level 10/10, put your sound on. contra.com/project-rate...

Really like this spec for "Accessible cross-platform UI standards" by @iknowdavehouse.bsky.social 👏 dashouse.github.io/accessible-c...

Good designers borrow

Shadow

Curious icon size to text size ratio going on over on PayPal

Interesting thoughts on how to #version #designSystems in Figma by @discolu.bsky.social https://buff.ly/3ZqQVFw This is a tough one. Figma could (should) solve this technically. Until then, we need to find other ways. So, get inspired, try them, and tell me which one did or didn't work for.

I've been building a shadcn Figma kit for a little while and it's now ready to use 🕺 Included: • Tailwind colors • Semantic colors in light/dark • Typography variables and styles • Effects • shadcn components • Example pages • Padding, margin, gap utility variables www.figma.com/community/fi...

AI won’t replace your job, it’ll mean you get less colleagues

The case for primitive semantics 🔵🔴🟡 read.cv/disco_lu/pri...

Latest 🌶️ thinking is that light and dark mode shouldn't live at the semantic level Perhaps we need a system level token, which handles modes. Then themes are handled in the semantic layer (Brand A / Brand B / Halloween / Summer)

Are there design systems out there that have opacity design tokens with different values for light an dark mode?

I (still) don't know what craft means. Here's 1800 words on why I struggle to know what the word "craft" means in our industry, and how it might be a pseudo science read.cv/disco_lu/craft

As I'm on a shadow kick at the moment, I published a file with 15 example shadows that I think are pretty common across modern software products I've also created some semantic-ish naming conventions. My favourite is a "peck" shadow, for a teeny nudge 🐤 www.figma.com/community/fi...

Figma's layer panel now scrolls 🤫

I'm currently tinkering away on another (I know) UI kit, called Minimal Viable Tokens, as an experiment to see how few a modern software system can get away with I'm experimenting with opacity in this one too, as well as renaming "primitives" to "mode" 🎨

No variable is an island, and that's why I think we've gotten semantic naming conventions all wrong* read.cv/disco_lu/var...

A call is worth a thousand prototypes

The best designers you know are the ones stealing like artists

Answer more questions than you ask

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Design systems are digitally transformative in that they are a bandaid solution for long term debt, due to a lack of interest from leadership in setting up and maintaining high quality bars

Introducing the grossest button I've ever seen

Let me guess, design systems are about people

1:1 design and code parity is the target of a team working in waterfall

This evening I'm playing around with the idea of tinted color ramps and components 🎨 Published them as a file if you'd like to play around: www.figma.com/community/fi...

No amount of user testing can replace having good taste, obsessive expertise, and gut feel

We haven’t had a new job title proposed in a while, so please allow me Software architect > product designer “Design” in the title will always force stakeholders to think of you as the person making stuff pretty, and not influencing the core business