Discover Figma’s game-changing updates: top 5 must-have features
by Paulina Olin ✦ 2 July 2023 ✦ 3 Min Read
It’s that time of year again. The most wonderful time of the year, in fact... if you're as Figma-obsessed as us.
Figma has dropped its new updates and it's really kicking off in the Design Teams Slack channel.
Read on to discover our top five favourite new features.
1. Min and max width/height
This is a total game-changer. You can now define min and max width and height for elements. Ensuring that when you resize the frame, they never become too small OR too large.
This keeps elements from overlapping with other elements and is a lot more real in terms of how the designs will look once built.
2. Quick-swap auto layout settings
This feature lets you swap the auto-layout setting between packed/spaced out, with a quick double-click. No opening of the menu necessary.
Fewer clicks = happy designers. So useful.
3. Wrapping
You can now set auto-layout to wrap elements within a frame, instead of having to organise them horizontally or vertically, depending on how large the frame is. Super helpful for designing responsive grids.
Top tip: Combine this with the new min and max width/height functions to get super sophisticated.
4. Inline preview
How many hours do you spend swapping between tabs in Figma? We reckon in the last 6 months alone we've spent at least 180 hours. Per person.
Well, no need anymore. You can now hit Shift + Space to bring up a little preview window as an overlay on the same page as the designs. Stunning.
5. Dev mode
Inspect just got a huge upgrade. There’s now a beta version of Dev Mode which works like a browser inspector for your Figma designs. This is a super easy way for devs to find things like padding amounts, colour codes and text styling details.
Design like a Planes pro
From quick swap auto layouts to wrapping, these top 5 new updates will have you designing like a pro in no time at all.
For more of our favourite Figma features, check out The design team's top 7 Figma updates.
