Top 10 Figma Plugins that we love

iteo
6 min readSep 28, 2020
figma plugins

I’m a classic example of a lazy person that loves finding shorter or simpler ways of doing something. That’s why I’m in love with Figma’s plugins. Over the past couple of years, Figma became one of the most popular apps among digital designers thanks to great collaboration, free plans, and TONS and TONS of plugins. Some of them are really live-saving but sometimes you gotta find the ugly duckling. You may ask: but why the hell do we need plugins? Well, they have the power to transform the way designers work. They extend Figma’s functionality and automate a lot of processes. Smart usage of plugins results in a huge productivity boost, workflow improvements, and a faster design process. Filling 10 lines of copy or inserting 30 random images into your screen with one click. Sounds great, huh? And it’s only a small piece of what you can achieve with some of the plugins.

Since the numbers of available plugins are growing tremendously, you might have a problem which plugins you should install and which not.

And that’s why you need to read the rest of this article. We’re gonna help you choose the best tools to improve your productivity and workflow.

Let’s start

Ready? Steady? Go to figma.com, download Figma, and create a free account. Then you simply need to click on the “Community Tab”, “Plugins”, and you’re good to go. Scroll through them like never before!

Zeplin

zeplin figma plugin

Our one and only true love when it comes to handovers with developers. It allows designers to upload their wireframes or visual designs straight from Figma and add them to project folders in Zeplin. The best thing? Annotations will be added automatically to the designs (sizes, colors, margins, and even CSS suggestions for certain elements) which will leave you with an online repository that the whole team can contribute to. You can also export your whole design system which includes Color Styles, Text Styles, and assets. And zeplin will automatically connect used components in screens with main components and help developers see where what was used. Number #1 if you’re a UX/UI/Product Designer. Absolute must-have!

You’ll find it here.

Content Reel

content reel figma plugin

If you’ve been a Sketch user, you’re probably familiar with Craft and its ability to input data into your designs. Content Reel does exactly that but in a new different way. You can choose the precise category you want to fill with content, for example Names, Companies, Date, Time, E-mails, URLs, even avatars, and Lorem Ipsum. Furthermore, you have super fine-grained control over how you want the data to display. For instance, you can say “I want 182 words of Lorem Ipsum here and 12 there”.

Great tool if you work with a lot of data in your designs.

You can find it here.

Feather Icons

feather icons figma plugin

Oh my lord. I would lie if I wouldn’t say it’s my almost #1 plugin in Figma.

Total life and time saver if your client doesn’t have enough budget for custom made icons or if you’re making High Fidelity Wireframes and you want to have nice icons with zero effort. What is great about this plugin is that you have icons on stroke, so you can easily change to fill without messing up the icon. Just simply launch the plugin, enter your phrase, and you’re good to go.

You can find it here.

Reattach Instance

reattach instance figma plugin

Great plugin when you have a problem with your components, and some of them just unlinked from their main instance. This problem sometimes also occurs while coping Frame from one project to another.

You just simply go to Plugins > Reattach Instance and Figma automatically swaps your frame with Child Instance of your desired component. Just make sure you have the exact name of your unlinked component and your main component. Great way to save your time. Did I mention that you can select more than one component at the time? 🙂

You’ll find the plugin here.

Figma Chat

figma chat plugin

And here we have it. The king of communication (only if you don’t use Slack. Slack Rulez!) between designers/developers/clients. It’s a simple chat with the ability to send text and the current selections of frames or other elements. Just select the elements you want to send to other people and tick the checkbox. All messages are encrypted and can only be read by people who are able to run plugins inside your file. So yeah, if you’re cooperating with other designers, just run Figma Chat, select Frame that you want to talk about, and send it!

The plugin’s here.

SmoothShadow

smooth shadow figma plugin

This time we have a plugin that I personally recommend if you’re more of an illustrator than a Product Designer. With SmoothShadow, you will be able to create really eye-catching and soft shadows. You’re basically doing shadows but with easing curves which makes it a huge game-changer. Colors, Layers, Alpha, Offset, and Blur within a single window and beziers. It makes shadows really nice, but unfortunately, it’s horrible when it comes to development. One layer with 8,9 shadows with totally different values? No way. Use it wisely!

You’ll find it here.

Blobs

blobs figma plugin

Another one for illustrators! Yay! At one time, blobs were really popular. I mean, really… really popular. They’re a great complement to the illustration which gives you a kind of depth of field to your design, but sometimes people have a problem with creating smooth blobs. And if you’re one of these people, download Blobs and make your problems go away. A really simple plugin to define the Complexity and Contrast of your Blobs and that’s it. “Make Blob” and you have a perfectly created smooth Blob.

If you’re interested, the Blob is here.

Unsplash

unsplash figma plugin

With this Figma plugin, you can easily insert amazing Unsplash images straight into your designs. You can either place a random image or search for a specific term and look for the perfect image for your needs, directly in the plugin’s simple interface. What’s great about it, all images can be used for free, regardless of whether it is a personal or commercial project.

Also, Unsplash will automatically fit the image to the size of your vector, so you won’t have a tremendous image pasted into small objects.

You can check it out here.

Find and replace

find and replace figma plugin

This one does exactly what it says. It finds your text/layer name, so you can replace it with another name. That’s all. It’s a very simple but incredibly useful Figma plugin. How many times did you have to do it manually? Well, those days are gone!

Try for yourself here.

Rename It

rename it figma plugin

A few months ago it was as a plugin, now it’s a built-in feature that can save you a lot of time. You can keep your files tidy and organized by batch renaming multiple layers using very specific naming rules and conventions.

Just select more than one layer, and hit CMR + R. Now you can swap exact words, letters, use numbering, etc.

That’s it for today folks! I hope you enjoyed our “specially curated” Top 10 Figma Plugins. You will find more Design Articles like this on our website.

Thanks!

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iteo

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