It is incredibly rewarding to create Figma plugins. There’s a moment of magic when your plugin first runs and you see a difficult task made trivial. It highlights how automation can make life so much easier, for you and everyone else. I think everyone should experience that moment.

I’ve been developing Figma plugins for almost two years now, and here I’d like to share key learnings that helped me discover new ideas and create better Figma plugins.

Start small

Start small to prioritize essential learning while executing well.

When starting out, especially if you are new to programming, pick a small problem. Starting small allows you to prioritize learning the mechanics of plugin development - the programming language, plugin runtime, and APIs - while executing reasonably well on a problem. My first and most downloaded plugin, Desaturate, just allows users to desaturate images in bulk.

Think in workflows

Think in workflows to automate a series of actions to create more effective plugins.

Often the goal of a plugin isn’t to automate a single action. It’s to automate partially, or entirely, a workflow. Take prototyping for example. All prototypes involve creating mockups, creating interactions, and assigning inputs. If you want to create a prototyping plugin, then to an extent it must encompass the workflow as a whole, rather than an individual action.

Address unmet needs

Address unmet needs to create impactful plugins for a specific group of users. They will thank you for it!

Plugins can address needs that aren’t met by Figma. For example, take checking word counts on text layers or adding colorblind filters to Figma. It’s important to talk to users to identify their needs. While working on Fortnite, I discovered our designers did not have an easy way to create radial interfaces. I created Radial Generator to address their needs.

Learn from power users

Bring power user techniques to the masses, so everyone can be faster.

All sufficiently advanced products have power users who push the envelope of what’s possible. Figma is no different. Their techniques may be difficult or require a series of specific steps to perform. There’s opportunity to create plugins that simplify the execution of these techniques, so everyone, not just power users may benefit from them.

Have fun

Don’t be afraid to create for fun! It’s a great way to learn.

You can learn a lot from fun experiments. It doesn’t always have to be serious or useful. I built Is This A Meme? 💁🏻🦋, a meme generator to learn to download images and scrape search results from the web. I can now apply these learning to any project going forward. Better yet, Matias Fiori and Travisse Hansen created Figsplosion, a plugin that literally blows up your design. Is it useful? Maybe not. Is it fun? YES! Did they learn a thing or two about plugin development? You bet.

Move on

Move on to more exciting stuff when it feels right.

Some plugins don’t turn out to be useful or are made obsolete by new features. It’s okay to stop investing in these plugins if you believe your energy will be better spent elsewhere.

Get started

If these learnings inspired new plugins ideas you’d like to pursue, don’t wait. Start with Figma’s Plugin Development Guide and Yuan Qing Lim’s Create Figma Plugin framework. Get to it! 🤘