Notes · 30 January 2025
On the Figma plugins worth keeping
Most Figma plugins are noise. The small set that has earned a permanent spot in the studio's library.
Most Figma plugins are noise. The Community panel is full of single-purpose tools that solve a problem the studio has once a year, in twenty seconds, with code the studio cannot read. Installing them produces a slower Figma session, more permission dialogs, and a vague sense that the design tooling is now somebody else’s problem.
The small set the studio actually uses, after auditing the library at the end of last year:
Figma Tokens (now Tokens Studio). The single plugin the studio could not work without. Manages design tokens as a structured data model rather than as a list of styles. Exports to JSON, CSS variables, Tailwind config, or Style Dictionary. The fact that it is the only plugin most engineers in the studio’s network ask for, by name, when starting a new project is a signal.
Content Reel. Replaces the placeholder text and image content in design files with realistic content from a curated library. The “lorem ipsum” replacement is the obvious win. The realistic-people-photographs replacement is, separately, useful.
Iconify. Search across roughly 100,000 icons from a hundred different icon sets. The catalogue is the deepest in any single tool. Exports as SVG. Replaces three or four other plugins the studio used to have installed.
Stark. Accessibility checks. Contrast. Colour-blind simulation. Focus order. The free tier covers most of what a small studio needs. The paid tier is worth it for teams that ship product.
A11y - Color Contrast Checker. Stark covers most contrast work. This one is a faster, lighter alternative for projects where the larger Stark plugin is overkill.
Pro Grid Tools. The grid system in Figma’s native tooling is, generously, primitive. Pro Grid Tools is the closest thing to a real grid system that Figma supports. The studio uses it on every project that has more than a single column.
That is the list. Six plugins. Down from the twenty-something the studio had installed at the start of the audit.
A few that the studio uninstalled, which other people swear by:
The “auto layout” enhancement plugins. Figma’s native auto-layout has improved enough that the third-party enhancements are mostly redundant. The studio is no longer running any of them.
The “AI” plugins for generating design from a prompt. Tested half a dozen. None produce work the studio would put in front of a client. All are slow.
The colour palette generators. The studio picks colour in oklch.com and pastes the values in. The plugins that generate palettes inside Figma all work in HSL, which is the wrong colour space for the work, and the palettes they produce are, as a result, not the palettes the studio wants.
The “remove background” plugins. The native Figma tool now does this well enough that the third-party alternatives are not worth the install.
A practical recommendation. At the start of every year, audit the plugin list. Uninstall everything that has not been used in the previous quarter. The Figma session is faster. The permission dialogs are quieter. The work, paradoxically, gets a little better, because the studio is making more decisions in the tool and fewer through plugins that do the deciding for it.