Last year, we fully transitioned to Figma here at Maark. Figma is a design tool that allows users to design, prototype, gather feedback, manage projects, and deliver design to devs right in the browser. It’s really been a process improvement for our design team, for our clients, and for our development team and has helped us in ensuring the quality of the work. So we’re super-excited about the possibilities of this tool moving forward.

We were so excited, in fact, that we invited Figma to our house.

Last week, we hosted the Boston Figma Meetup group at our Charlestown office for beer, pizza, and presentations around what other groups are doing with Figma.

First up was Tom Lowry, Designer Advocate at Figma, who shared his path to creating plugins to solve the repetitive tasks he'd encounter in his day-to-day work. The best part was that Tom didn't have much Javascript experience, but was able to learn just enough along the way to develop the tools he thought were useful. His presentation has some great resources for anyone interested in developing a Figma plugin but is not sure where to start.

Next was Masha Shaposhnikova, Designer and Developer at LogicManager, a risk management software company here in Boston. She shared a helpful step-by-step guide for creating an extensible table component using Figma's new Auto Layout features. Creating tables in design tools has always been a struggle, taking tons of time and then falling apart when you change one thing. The unique nature of Masha's work at LogicManager inspired her to make a stretchable and extensible table component that is a huge time-saver. You can check out her guide in Figma and integrate better tables into your work.

Lastly but not leastly, our own Alex Carr, the Creative Director here at Maark, shared his work on our new accessibility plugin, Contrast. He talked about the story of why we made it and its new, soon-to-be-released scanning feature, which allows designers to scan entire Figma pages for contrast issues. Check out and install Contrast today, right in Figma.

It was a great night, and a lot of fun to get the community together here in Boston around a design tool our team has grown to love and which has become a core component of our design process.