I know I’ve commented on this thread before, but in my opinion the fact that there is no ETA or even confirmation that this feature will ever be implemented shows a lack of understanding of what a design system is and what it can accomplish. It’s symptomatic of an issue many tools have – implementing the exciting before the necessary. Who cares if the house has basement waterproofing, that’s boring! It has a jacuzzi and a pool with three waterslides, wahoo!

We don’t need fancy AI features or several new kinds of Dev Mode annotations. Sure, they’re nice to have, but what would be even nicer is for variables to be able to do what the Tokens Studio plugin has been able to do for years, because the person behind that plugin understands the absolute basics of design systems.

This is one of the reasons that I’ve avoided using Figma for years, until my company acquired another with a design team that used it, and it didn’t make sense to make them change. But Figma is seriously lacking some basic features and functionality that other design tools have had for decades in some cases. Not only these basic things like easily changing opacity, but object styles that allow you to apply a collection of property values like stroke color and width, fill, effects, etc.

And while the variables are semi-useful at this point, I’d much rather have basic interaction capabilities like being able to change the variant of one component instance from a different component instance, being able to move an object to/by specific coordinates, and to show/hide any component. These are all things I’ve been able to do in other prototyping tools easily for a really long time.

+1 really need this!

I have variables such as ‘primary’, ‘primary-tonal’ (30% alpha) ‘primary-tonal-light’ (12% alpha) and so on (which are lighter tones of primary color). It would be beneficial if the alpha channel could be controlled independently, so I only have to update one variable instead of 3…

Need this also!

Adding myself to this list, needed feature~ 🙂

I still need this feature. I just don’t why they’re not adding it. Figma just announced variable support for gradients! How can that be more important than changing the opacity for variable references?

Remember to vote. Figma consider only feedbacks with huge votes

I’m thrilled that Figma has finally completed the last piece of the design variables puzzle. The addition of typography and gradients allows us to fully implement system-level variable design. However, I have a small issue. Although we can now use variables for gradient and shadow colors, within design tokens, if our color palettes haven’t defined transparency, we can’t modify the transparency when inheriting colors semantically. This forces us to create new color palettes specifically for transparency, which is a huge waste of time and meaningless work, especially since we often need to adjust transparency when using gradients and shadows. Therefore, I hope we can adjust transparency while inheriting colors from the color palettes.

This is the reason why we’re not switching to variables. I asked this question multiple times on various Figma webinars, but every time it was politely ignored 🥲

Would be great to hear from @jjcm if there is anything in development we could hope for.

这个功能真的很需要，这相当于设计系统的闭环

I’ve also asked this question several times in webinars (e.g. last week’s) and all questions except mine have been answered… I don’t understand why and am beginning to believe in a conspiracy 😃

We need this! the workaraound means that all of our Components need to be redesigned aswell… please Figma!

I ran into this issue during my first attempt at applying opacity on a drop shadow using a color token (fail). Then I tried to apply opacity to a style using the color token (fail). Last ditch effort was attempting to apply opacity on the color token itself (fail), which is how I found myself in this thread. It’s a bummer.

Crossing my fingers that this will be at Config

Having talked to a few Figma devs/community people about this, they are well aware of the ask (it has been one of the top asks for years).

I don’t understand how this doesn’t drive Figma devs themselves crazy when they use the tool, but for some reason it just hasn’t been a high priority for them.

Maybe we will see this at Config, but I highly doubt it.

+1 for this feature and the ability to bind color opacity to its own number variable.

So many color systems depend on semantic opacity definitions that this really feels like a must-have. For example, Material 3 has hover opacity (8%), focus/pressed (12%) and dragged (16%). Tailwind lets you define opacity on a per-color basis, but if you want parity between a set of variables and all the Tailwind color classes (plus your custom colors), your number of color variables would increase by more than an order of magnitude due to needing to define a color variable for each opacity level. There are other examples, but those are a couple of the most popular use cases.

Being unable to define and use variables for alpha channel values (1) makes us less efficient as designers and (2) creates a disconnect between designers and developers in terms of what is designed and what is implemented.

+1 to this please

I’ve never written comments on forma, but for the sake of this feature I did! Please do it!

We really need this. Right now, we have to detach base color variables from the source library just to add opacity. We also have to manually maintain a map with notes as the source library can be updated.

Any solution for this in 2024?

They are now focused on new unfinished beta features. It’s been a year I don’t think we’ll see this feature completed.

I need this too! Can’t believe it’s not done yet.

Maybe we should ask almighty AI to implement this feature because Figma devs have no intention to do it.

Again adding a comment to keep this thread alive.