5 Essential Figma plugins for product design

At Spinning Fox we spend most of our time inside Figma and one of the great things about it is the wealth of plugins available to enhance your process, or save your time. What isn’t a time saver though, is trawling through the plugin library to find one that will be great for you. So here’s a short list of the plugins our design team love and use the most.

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Lore (for Lorem Ipsum)

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Ok, not the most exciting plugin, but incredibly useful to help you get designs moving quickly off the ground. It does what you’d imagine, no need for copying and pasting, simply inject some dummy copy straight into your text block.

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"For like eight years - i’ve been copying and pasting from this fugly site out of sheer lazy top of google habit - not even from one of the good custom ipsum generators - and now Lore just whacks in the right number of words / sentence / paragraph for me."
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Chris, Product Designer

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Butter

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Probably more useful in the pre Auto-Layout days, but still useful none-the-less. Neatly, instantly and consistently deal with unwanted gaps, overlaps and align and distribute objects evenly.

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"I have it setup with shortcuts, and it’s a lifesaver for me. Maybe less so since auto layout was introduced, but it’s still great for spacing and aligning things on the fly when producing rapid wireframes for example."

Tyler, Design Director

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Rename It

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Either you’ve been beavering away at your design for a couple of hours or you are building out your components with variants - but you glance at your layers and it’s an absolute mess of layer 1 - layer 237. Don’t ignore it, get hold of Rename It and quickly name multiple layers in one hit, name them with sequential numbering, find and replace or even rename the layers to include the width and height of the layer.

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"If you have loads of variations of the same component with the same name you can quickly number them all without manually having to click into each layer. Or if you’re making multiple styles for a component in a design system (e.g a button with default, hover, disabled) you can duplicate and change the styles then do a bulk rename which saves loads of time."

Nicolle, Senior UX Designer

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Propstar

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That leads on quite nicely to our next plugin. If you’re a product designer, you probably like things organised neatly. Well, this is definitely right up your street. Select your components, run Propstar and boom, it’s been done for you.

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"Ideal for laying out and smartly organising your component variants. Just create your component set (name the layer variants using Rename It), then use the Propstar plugin to embed a table of neatly spaced out component variants in a nice visual table with auto-generated labels etc."

Matt, Senior Product Designer

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Miro

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If you use Figma, then you probably know and use Miro. It’s great for collaborative whiteboarding, and at Spinning Fox we use it for exercises like research documentation, idea generation, site maps and user flows. The plugin helps to bridge the gap between user flows and designs, allowing you to export frames from Figma to Miro.

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"It’s super simple to place my Figma screen designs straight across to our flows in Miro, and what’s more I can just sync with any design updates. It’s such a time saver not having to update content in multiple places."

Dan, Product Designer

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