July 29, 2025 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #518
This newsletter issue was sent out to 188,344 subscribers on Tuesday, July 29, 2025.
Editorial
It’s Figma time! Indeed, many design teams these days use Figma, yet sometimes, it’s difficult to figure out just the right way to use it for your needs. How well do you organize a design system? And how do you document your design decisions and specs (if at all)?
That’s what this newsletter is all about — workflow in Figma, with useful techniques, strategies, and pointers for you to boost the work in Figma, for you and for your team.
On another note, we’ve been busy and made sure to have your backs covered with a good number of friendly events coming up soon — with best practices in Figma and practical insights all around UX, accessibility, design systems and front-end. Perhaps you’d like to join in as well? We’d love to see you there!
- SmashingConf Freiburg 🇩🇪 (Sep 8–11), on design systems, complex UIs, refactoring and performance,
- SmashingConf New York 🇺🇸 (Oct 6–9), on UX, design, dashboards, accessibility, CSS, design systems and management,
- SmashingConf Amsterdam 2026 🇧🇪 (Apr 13–16), UX, design, Figma, CSS, accessibility, and product design.
- In-person Workshops in Antwerp and Madrid 🇧🇪 🇪🇸 (Sep–Nov 2025), on Figma and Complex UIs.
That’s all for now. I hope you have a truly smashing rest of the week, and let’s get better at Figma!
— Iris Lješnjanin
1. How To Keep Figma Files Clean
Keeping your Figma files clean and organized doesn’t take much effort, but it makes working with them a lot more convenient — not only for yourself but everyone who views or navigates the files. Anna Gordiyevska shares a checklist with 16 simple tips for keeping Figma files clean.
The checklist includes tips for naming layers, frames, and sections, for organizing pages and creating chapters and cover pages, as well as documentation. Useful plugins and tutorials are also included. Small tips that go a long way. (cm)
2. Figma Handoff And Spec Helper
If you and your team want to capture and communicate thoughts and design changes directly in Figma, the File Management UI Library might be just what you’ve been looking for. Created by the Experience team at Deliveroo, it includes file management goodies that help you bring more context to your designs — with banners, detail blocks, sticky notes, and more.
Compared to making a similar annotation from scratch, the library not only saves you precious time but, as the folks at Deliveroo found out in their team, it also encourages people to be more diligent about annotating their work, which, in effect, impacts how they collaborate with engineers, PMs, and one another. (cm)
3. Design File And Cover Page Organization
We often assume that fellow team members know how to navigate Figma the way we do. However, other designers may have different methods, and engineers and PMs may not know where to start at all. To organize your Figma files so they are easy to use for everyone involved in a project, Lee Munroe shares the template he and the design team at One Signal Design use for organization.
The template has pages for everything from the cover to designs anyone can reference, local components, wireframes, user testing, and user research material already included. A fantastic boilerplate that can be adapted and modified depending on the size and complexity of the project. (cm)
4. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
- Building Interactive, Accessible Components with Modern CSS & JS Dev
with Stephanie Eckles. Aug 18–27 - UX Strategy Masterclass UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Aug 20–29 - Accessible Typography for Web & UI Design Masterclass Design
with Oliver Schöndorfer. Sep 11–19 - Behavioral Design Workshop UX
with Susan and Guthrie Weinschenk. Sep 18 – Oct 3 - Dataviz Accessibility Workshop Dev
with Sarah L. Fossheim. Sep 22 – Oct 6 - Jump to all workshops →
5. Figma Workspace Template
Microsoft designers Raquel Piqueras and Christina Yang adapted the way they work in Figma to improve collaboration and productivity. To help you do the same, they released the Figma Workspace Template, a toolkit to stay organized and bring more focus and clarity to your workflow.
If you want to give it a try on your next project, duplicate the Figma file and use it as your workspace. It includes a cover and intake form that keeps everyone aware of links, stakeholders, and deadlines. You can also track your progress and past work, map requirements to your visuals, use stickies to clarify aspects of your design, and map screens out to user stories. A handy little helper! (cm)
6. How To Clean Up Messy Figma Files
Maybe you’ve been there before: You have to work on a Figma file that another designer created and, as it turns out, they haven’t worked in a clean environment. So how can you make sense of the mess? Edward Chechique wrote a step-by-step guide to help you clean up and organize Figma files that you inherited from other designers.
The three-step process that Edward shares in his guide is not copy-and-paste. It instead helps you understand the mindset, so that you can adapt the process to your needs and find and componentize patterns to create a clear UI kit with typography styles, color styles, and components. Valuable tips to help you overcome the initial pain of dealing with an unorganized file and make your work more efficient. (cm)
7. Useful Design Timesavers In Figma
We all love a good tool to speed up efficiency and avoid mundane design tasks, and, luckily, the Figma community is constantly coming up with new little helpers that have our backs. If you’re looking for a quick overview of design timesavers worth trying out, Vitaly collected some useful plugins and starter kits.
Whether you want to quickly set up a design system with Figma variables, track versions of your design iterations, or automatically replace text in mock-ups, Vitaly’s collection is a goldmine of handy little helpers to save you time in your day-to-day design work. A huge thank you to the wonderful Figma community sharing their creations so everyone can benefit from them! (cm)
8. Meet Accessible UX Research, A Brand-New Smashing Book 📚
In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books. For our newest book, we have teamed up with Dr. Michele A. Williams: Meet “Accessible UX Research.”
“Accessible UX Research” is your practical guide to making UX research more inclusive of participants with different needs — from planning and recruiting to facilitation, asking better questions, avoiding bias, and building trust. Print shipping in August, eBook available for download later this summer. Pre-order the book, and save off the full price.
That’s All, Folks!
Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!
This newsletter issue was written and edited by Geoff Graham (gg), Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf), and Iris Lješnjanin (il).
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