Design Thursday #48
A weekly recap of everything you need to know about tools, events, guidelines and design in general.
Variable fonts in Framer
Framer recently added support for variable fonts. In the updated font picker you will now find new categories including "Variable" which will show all of the available variable fonts. Many properties like weight, slant, width, ... are all supported based on the font, which gives you endless customization options.
Jitter's New Lottie exporter
Jitter updated their Lottie exporter to support the latest Lottie features, to make sure your animations look great wherever they are being used.
Play audio support
Play will soon be adding audio support in their next update. You can upload audio files, user the device's microphone to input audio, create real-time waveforms, add different interactions and sync multi tracks. This update will make your prototypes even more realistic.
Figma quality-of-life improvements
Figma has released quite some new smaller features over the past few weeks to improve your way of working. These are not all of them, but just a few that stand out:
- Draft presenter notes with AI: Quickly generate presenter notes based on the content
- Offline prototypes and slides: You no longer have to be online to test or share your prototypes or slides. You can download them to make sure everything goes smoothly. Via the options menu you can select Advanced settings > Make available offline.
- Resizable prototyping modal: The prototype modal can now be resized (not to be confused with the responsive option that was already in Figma).
- Custom fonts: When adding a new local font, you no longer have to refresh Figma. It will automatically be detected and available, yay for this one!
- Underline styles for text: Underlines can now be customized by color, shape (solid, dotted, wavy), thickness and offset.
- Variable changes in branch review: When you make changes to variables in a branch and ask some colleagues to review it, the changes will now show up and show possible conflicts with the main file.
- Variables in component properties: Instances of a component can now use variables to make your prototypes even more flexible.
- Updates eye dropper: The eye dropper got redesigned and now supports variables and styles. You can create new styles/variables and copy the color value in different formats.