Astro

Introduction

The Figma Community is powered by collaboration among designers, developers, and creatives from all around the world.

Figma’s playground stands out for its vibrant community resources and wide range of plugins, which offer a variety of creative opportunities for designers.

Figma’s current workflow of using plugins at times falls short in matching the speed at which designers create, how they juggle between multiple plugins, and collaborate with large teams on multiple projects.

Plugins remain outside the workspace, forcing users to repeatedly run, close and re-run the same plugins. There is no way to add or categorize them and consistently use them across projects.

Users are also unable to run several plugins at once or share plugins in real-time with their teams which hinders creativity and slows down their workflow.

When using plugins like Motion, they take up so much of view space. Nearly impossible without having a widescreen monitor, would be nice to move that plugin window outside the desktop app.

Silly_Vasily

June 2022

Several plugins running at once is definitely a must. E.g I need to have Tokens Studio and Zebra Plugin open at the same time to check color-proofing. Switching plugins constantly is very annoying and insufficient.

Dmitri_Albert

Sep 2023

Plugin windows are often placed in the middle of the screen and I don’t really know what to do with them as they get in the way of my work

I feel the need to move them to another screen to work with them.

Andres_Sanz_Gonsalez

June 2023

Sometimes I have to work with multiple plugins at the same time. Currently, I can open only one plugin at a time. Would be good If I can see multiple windows open or simply toggled when clicked.

Roozbeh

Aug 2022

Run commands is great, but sometimes I just forget the name of the plugin and then I need to find it in the list and I lose time.

If you could add managing of plugin UI, I would always have plugins that I am I interested in opening and don’t loose time searching for them

But the problem is also that in figma you can run only 1 plugin at a time.

Jordan_123

June 2022

How might we improve the plugin workflow to allow for more seamless and efficient use of plugins?

Presenting

Plug It

Efficiently use plugins
without repeatedly opening
them

Add Plugins to workspace

Save liked plugins for
specific use cases and share
with teams

Categorize and Share

Toggle between plugins
to compare and use
simultaneously

Run Several Plugins

Plug it blends seamlessly into Figma's workspace...

The Interface

Plug it is docked in the left panel

Toggle between plugins and add them to the workspace

The UI is intuitive, following Figma's convention for creating components

Add & Categorize

Added the plugins appear in the left panel

No longer need to run, close and re-run selected plugins

Create use-case based category for e.g. ‘Stock Images’

Multiple Plugins at once

Plugins open in seamlessly in the right hand panel

Open and close all the plugins in a created category

Compare different plugins by running them simultaneously

Expanding the Categories

Create multiple categories

Plugins are organised and no longer crowd the workspace

Run and re-use multiple plugins to suit creative and workflow needs

Faster and Efficient worlflow

Intuitively fits into your workspace

More space for creativity

Final Thoughts

Plug it was an fun exploration into solving design problems with a creative and realistic approach. I really enjoyed the process and building the concept from scratch.

I’d like to further explore possiblilities of more category creation, different ways to display multiple plugins, and the overall scalability of the project. If given the chance, I would love to expand and improve this concept!

Plug It

What the community has to say...

What the community
has to say...