Plugins are a way to customize, extend, and automate Figma.

When making a plugin, you’re designing something for yourself, which can be quite fun and a nice change of pace. There’s also a certain satisfaction in definitively solving a workflow that used to take hours, or in hyper-optimizing a particular interaction or piece of UI in your plugin.

This article is my attempt to codify some heuristics for crafting plugins for Figma, referring where relevant to examples from the plugins that I’ve made. I love design tools and UI engineering, and aspire to bring a level of craft and precision to this work. The hope is that this article would be interesting to plugin creators and users alike.

Here we go!