Dylan Field on the newest addition to Figma’s product line: ​“Figma has acquired Weavy, a platform that brings generative AI and professional editing tools into the open canvas. As Figma Weave, the company will help build out image, video, animation, motion design, and VFX media generation and editing capability on the Figma platform.”

In A Match Made in Heaven, Weavy’s early investor, Ben Blumenrose from Designer Fund, shared three key features of their product approach that make for a very powerful tool — being model agnostic, exposing process, and working as an aggregator.

I’ve been waiting for this video and kept thinking about it long after watching. To kick off his new series This is taste, Tommy Geoco flew to Kalamazoo, MI, to spend two days with Ridd. His Dive Club interviews show where the puck is going to be for the design industry and have been my most recommended resource for a long time. Tommy did a great job showing the actual person behind the online persona through his environment, family, motivation, and process of building the Inflight and Dive Club. Can’t wait for the future episodes of the series!

Earlier this year, Grammarly acquired collaborative workspace Coda and email app Superhuman, with the CEO from Coda stepping into the role of CEO for Grammarly and the entire company later changing its name to Superhuman. Smith & Diction developed an interactive identity with motion design at its core, while the brand architecture of the new company was evolving every day. The new icon system by Helena Zhang and custom pattern generators made in Figma Make show an incredible attention to detail from this team.

A reminder that Figma’s free virtual conference for the design systems community is happening this week on Tuesday, October 28, from 9:00 am to 2:00 pm PDT. Besides the keynote, I’m especially interested in talks ​“Spectacular slots” by Nathan Curtis and ​“Crafting design context for agentic coding workflows” by Jake Albaugh.

Sara Clayton from Dropbox shares some of her recent lessons and observations about experimenting with AI: ​“the design-to-engineering bridge is improving but not yet seamless, weak systems and shortcuts will be surfaced rather than hidden, true progress depends on internal champions who can push the boundaries, and – above all – critical thinking remains the foundation of good design.”

I shared some of my thoughts on Liquid Glass in issue #229, so it was refreshing to see how Linear approached the new design language. Couldn’t agree with this more: ​“The one effect we chose not to reproduce was Liquid Glass’s refraction. Technically, it requires access to pixel-level data that isn’t available to third-party developers. Aesthetically, it also wasn’t the right choice because refraction can make dense professional interfaces harder to read. By relying on precise blurs, masking, and lighting, we maintained a sense of depth without losing clarity.”

Schema — Figma’s conference for the design systems community — is back for the virtual livestream on Tuesday, October 28. Topics include the future of design systems, best practices for design and development with AI, and product updates to design systems in Figma.

Dylan Field comes to Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast to talk about keeping internal morale up after the Adobe acquisition fell through, his approach to maintaining pace and a sense of urgency 13 years in, how to systematically develop taste, how Figma decides which product lines to add, why he obsesses over ​“time to value”, and how AI is making design more valuable. Don’t miss Lenny’s biggest takeaways from this conversation.

Erik D. Kennedy attempts to answer two questions: Will AI take design jobs? If so, which ones? And in light of that, what should designers focus on? Love this advice: ​“I’d recommend steering your own designs away from the hallmarks of UI-by-AI: Inter, cards displayed in parallel, everything being 8px rounded, etc. The time to know your brand, know your audience, know the problem you’re solving, and lean way in starts now.”