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Issue #222 •

CDO. Grug. Unicorn.

Unicorn Studio

Unicorn Studio makes creating WebGL effects, motion, and interactivity easy for designers. Later, they can be embedded in Framer, Webflow, or any website.

Grug designer

A fun chatbot made by Max Schoening from Notion. Reading The Grug Brained Developer first is recommended, but ​“What Grug know” is a good primer on simplicity and avoiding pain.

A Treatise on AI Chatbots Undermining the Enlightenment

Maggie Appleton argues today’s chatbots drift toward sycophancy — undercutting Enlightenment habits of skeptical, reader-engaging discourse — and suggests giving users explicit ​“critique modes,” routing to tougher personas, and training methods beyond RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback) so assistants challenge us, not flatter us.

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Recent issues

Issue #221 •

Figma turns 13. Inflight vibing. Glass icons.

Happy birthday, Figma!

Figma turned 13 on August 13th! To celebrate, Rogie streamed the live process of drawing a birthday card with portraits of Dylan and Evan — what a long way from the early sketches!

More ways to edit images with AI

Updates to AI-powered image editing features across all products — remove background or boost resolution for up to 25 images at once, and choose between Gemini 2.0 Flash and GPT Image 1 to get results that best match your prompt.

Vibin’ on Inflight

In this livestream, James McDonald iterates on Ridd’s design for Inflight and talks through design decisions in real time. Nice peek at how product polish actually happens.

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Issue #220 •

IPO. Draw updates. Make and AI out of beta.

Release Notes 2025: July Edition

Miggi and special guests walk through updates across Figma Make, Sites, Buzz, FigJam, Slides, Dev Mode, Draw, and Design. Highlights include style context and Supabase integration in Make, vector simplifying and offset in Draw, grid updates, Dev Mode’s interactive inspection, and Sites’ background video fill.

The making of a product icon

A behind-the-scenes look at how Figma’s product icons come together: Tim Van Damme shares guidelines (one pixel strokes, rounded caps, consistent and balanced sizes) and iterations it takes to make the whole suite feel like a family. Love the idea of rating confidence: ​“Tim frequently solicits feedback from product designers and product managers, guiding the conversation with a one-to-five star rating to show how confident he is in a design.”

Interfaces That Augment or Replace?

Zeh Fernandes revisits David Krakauer’s ​“complementary vs. competitive” framework — think abacus vs. calculator, GPS as a skill-eroder — and argues that AI tools should teach as well as do. ​”Often, we don’t want to be better navigators, or our use of math is so trivial it doesn’t justify constant practice. And that’s fine. So long as it’s a deliberate choice. But in digital product design, the emphasis tends to fall on outcomes alone: getting the job done, removing friction, making everything feel effortless. In the short term, we gain speed. Over time, though, we risk dulling the very skills we once actively cultivated.”

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