What makes this list special is that it’s a collection of plugins and widgets we in the Emplifi Design team actually use almost daily, some of them since we started using Figma. I’m happy to share this list of gems with you, and I hope you’ll find them useful.

Figma plugins

Content Reel

Content Reel is a very well-designed plugin from Microsoft that you can use to add content to your design. There are a bunch of predefined collections of numbers, emails, addresses, brands, images, and more. But the most valuable feature is being able to create your own custom collection. We use this feature a lot once we have the content placeholders we will feature prototypes.

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This plugin is also on top of my personal list, and I use it a lot in almost every project.

• Creator:
• Microsoft
• Community page: Content Reel

Unsplash

This simple plugin allows you to insert beautiful images directly from Unsplash.com into your designs.

It’s particularly useful if you need to fill several areas with images displaying the same theme or subject, e.g. food.

• Creators:
• Unsplash
• Kirill Zakharov
• Liam Martens
• Community page: Unsplash

Smooth Shadow & Beautiful Shadows

If you want to create smooth and layered shadows, these two plugins are exactly what you need.

Smooth Shadow allows you to create and control shadows in more detail with an elaborate setup. But one element is missing: unfortunately, it’s impossible to set up the direction of the shadow. This shortage makes the plugin harder to use in some cases.

• Creator: Philipp Brumm
• Community page: Smooth Shadow

Similar to Smooth Shadow, Beautiful Shadows gives you the option to create nice and natural-looking shadows. The setup is simpler and more straightforward: you drag a ‘light source’ which casts a shadow on selected elements. If you want, you can set up the shadow manually, but this option is sometimes laggy.

• Creator: Alex Widua
• Community page: Beautiful-Shadows

Stark

If you care about accessibility (and you should if you design digital products for people), this plugin is for you.

In the past, we used Stark mostly as a contrast checker. But it allows you to do much more through vision simulation, typography analysis, or to check touch targets.

• Creator: Stark
• Community page: Stark

Design Lint

Design Lint is a great way to check if all the layers in your design are connected to your design system. We quickly embraced this plugin, as we had been looking for efficient ways to find missing styles within our design system for a long time.

Design Lint especially helps my DesignOps team to ensure that all styles prepared by our product designers are connected with our Soul design system.

• Creator:
• Discord
• Daniel Destefanis
• Community page: Design Lint

Font Fascia

Font Fascia shows you a list of all font families and styles used across an entire document or page. It also shows you which text layer the font is used in.

I like this plugin because thanks to it, I’m able to check all styles in one click, which saves me tons of time.

• Creator: thenew
• Community page: Font Fascia

Figma widgets

Simple Vote

Do you do preference tests? If so, this plugin is ideal. We use it to quickly decide which direction we want to go in.

It’s perfect if you have a bigger team and/or enough people who want to contribute to design decisions.

• Creator:
• Rogie King
• Community page: Simple Vote

Jira

Like many other design teams, we use Jira by Atlassian to plan and organize our work-related tasks.

The Jira widget for Figma helps us to connect our design specifications with Jira tasks to keep our devs and co-designers on track.

• Author:
• Atlassian
• Figma
• Roy Fu
• Community page: Jira

Sticky Note

Sticky Note is, for me, one of the best ways to add a space for notes to any Figma file.

We usually use it for meeting notes, design-related links and info for devs, or for to-do lists.

• Author:
• Nitish Khagwal
• Community page: Sticky Note

And that’s it. 😁 Of course, every designer uses other great plugins and widgets depending on the project we’re ok working on or our personality. If I try to list all of them, this article will never end!

But before I go, I will share a few other highlights recommended by my colleagues: TinyImage, Noise and Downsize are used mainly by our visual designers; Text Edit is recommended by our UX writer; AEUX and LottieFiles are endorsed by our motion designers; and Redlines was mentioned by our UI designers.

Now that you know our rockstars, I’d love to know yours. What are the plugins you can’t live without?

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