Learning Log, Jan 2022
Late in January we moved into our new/first house! It’s been a whirlwind of a month between all the packing and unpacking and life administrative tasks, as well as getting things off the ground for this quarter at work. I am looking forward to soon relaxing in a completely unpacked home.
Improving my Figma chops
When I was a designer/developer full-time, I was making websites in Illustrator. I’ve played around with Figma on personal projects or on small things for work, but really hadn’t gotten the opportunity to embrace the design-at-scale, team-centric features that are really the force multipliers behind the product.
In the past week or so, I’ve made much more of a concerted effort to actually learn Figma. A random collection of thoughts on this:
- I usually learn by doing. If I am following a tutorial, I like to read docs or a blog post, rather than watch a video. I’m realizing that 1) learning UI is the place where video walkthroughs are WAY more helpful to me, and 2) Figma is one of those products where I will absolutely miss or take a long time to discover time-saving features if I just mess around with things as I go. For example:
- I feel like a buffoon for not realizing there’s a keyboard shortcut to zoom to a selection (
SHIFT+2). - I wouldn’t have necessarily discovered particular Smart Selection features.
- I feel like a buffoon for not realizing there’s a keyboard shortcut to zoom to a selection (
- I have clearly been under-utilizing Constraints.
- I learned so much about libraries, styles, components, and variants in the past week. Shout out to my colleague Kristy Marcinova for some 🔥 tips on this, and also for letting me know you can have more than one prototype “flow” per Page.
- Despite some initial learning curves, Figma would’ve saved me so much time when I was a designer. Web designers today—who have access to Figma to do their work—are very fortunate.
On the Internet
- Seeing other peoples’ Genuary submissions made me wish afresh that I had dabbled in generative art.
- Let’s Settle This: vote on the internet’s age-old debates.
- Deeply enamored with the type on this brand for Strawberry Western, by Ryan Bugden.
- Play jigsaw puzzles online!
Reading
Web design and development
- Where do you put spacing on design system components?
- Build your metadata library
- Div divisiveness
- Make Free Stuff