Hey there. It has been a week since @figmadesign's #Schema2021 conference, so as a public service, I thought I would rate all the talks on a scale from 1 to 10.
A+ thinking around dealing with contributions from your design team, having fun while working, and a demo of their amazing plugin (Moria) which they use for everything.
Rating: 10/10
Mastering the art of code - aligned UI kits by @HonzaTmn
So useful, and chock full of advice on how to set up your design system, as well as how to alert your team to breaking changes.
I learned so much! Tons of useful, directly actionable info.
Rating: 10/10
Reimagining Atlassian design system, from product to platform by @jenniesyip
Possibly the talk most densely packed with info nuggets.
Super interesting look at the evolution of Atlassian's design system. Great advice at both the tactical and conceptual levels!
I couldn't be more excited about a feature release than this one.
Combining branching with realtime multiplayer was a huge technical and UX challenge, and the team has been relentless in their pursuit of a seamless solution.
Why is this hard? On an engineering level, writing code for Figma can sometimes feel like a distributed computing problem.
Multiple networked clients are making changes to a single data representation which needs to eventually sync up.
2/n
Now throw into the mix the notion of multiple versions of that data representation, along with user expectations for how you can see the different versions, merge between them, etc.
It's hard to make this all feel seamless, and the team has done a great job!
3/n
Phase 0 - brainstorming: We always have way more feature ideas under consideration than we would ever have time to build.
Primarily these come either directly from user requests, or from insights that we get from watching people work.
2/n
Sometimes, people make progress on designs even before features make it onto our roadmap.
Maybe a designer is particularly passionate about something and wants to spend some time thinking about how something could be better. Could also be a PM or an engineer.
3/n
I turned 50 today which is surreal. I feel dumb sharing these words but here are some sappy thoughts.
If you ever have a nice thought about someone, tell them. Whether it’s at work or in life, everyone needs to hear nice thoughts.
Try to listen very deeply to what makes you happy. Not the exterior signifiers of happiness, but the true silly stupid emotion. Let yourself have as much of that as you can.
A lot of people have been asking why the items in an Auto Layout frame go backwards in @figmadesign.
I usually hesitate to answer seemingly simple questions that end up requiring super long answers, but... here we go!
1/n
For starters, let's consider normal everyday layers. If you select a layer and then duplicate it, do you expect it to go above or below the original item in z-index?
If it goes below, you can't see it, since it's under the original, so it has to above.
2/n
Meanwhile, the layers panel traditionally shows things in an order where higher z-index items go above things with lower z-index. Things have been this way as far back as I can remember.
That means the second layer is shown above the first layer in the layers panel.
3/n