Ruxandra Duru works with Google designers focusing on the intersection of color, emotion, and UX design. ​“After years of what we could call a color fixation, I’ve developed a three-step approach to color theory. My secret to making color more pleasurable and intentional — and much less scary — has to do with balancing, relating, and completing your colors.”

Elie Majorel shares the playbook of prototyping with AI tools, allowing other designers to spend less time on appearance and more time on impact. ​“One Sunday I opened Miro, sketched a few boxes for a new agent search, and copied the flow into Claude. Claude wrote a clear spec. I pasted that prompt into Lovable, pressed generate, and two hours later a working React repo ran in a sandbox. Engineers forked the code the week after. Leaders clicked the demo and said keep going. Two hours from idea to running product. No Figma layers. No endless handoff.”

Romina recorded a quick walkthrough on how to build clickable prototypes using Figma MCP and Cursor.

Apple’s SF Pro and SF Compact fonts are now automatically downloaded in Figma Editor, Slides, and Buzz.

Sebastiaan de With is the co-founder and designer of the award-winning apps Halide and Kino for photography and video. In this article, he imagines what could be next for the UI design at Apple: ​“What would I do if I were Apple’s design team? What changes would I like to see, and what do I think is likely? Considering where technology is going, how do I think interface design should change to accommodate?”

(Reminder that WWDC25 is happening this week, with a keynote on Monday at 10 AM PT. That’s when we’ll find out how close his predictions are to what Apple designers have in mind.)

Speaking of Apple, the latest winners of the Design Award were announced. Congrats to Play for winning the Innovation award!

Whoa! Epic collab between Soleio and Indie​.vc. Six interviews with design pioneers and true first-of-kind designers — Henry Modisett, Colin Dunn, Jessica Hische, Julie Zhuo, Nicholas Jitkoff, and Susan Kare. Now I just need to set aside 7 hours to watch them all ASAP.

Lenny Rachitsky’s survey was all over Design Twitter this week. Next are a few interesting takeaways. 1) ​“Workers at smaller companies report significantly lower burnout levels than those at larger companies.” 2) Designers are the most burnt-out tech workers, closely followed only by Research and Growth — I wonder if it’s because these roles constantly deal with ambiguity and limited autonomy. 3) Optimism about career and current role is on the decline, with designers having the largest negative sentiment change. 4) ​“Fewer than 1 in 3 tech workers (26.6%) rate their managers as highly effective, while more than 4 in 10 (42.3%) rate their managers as ineffective. […] People in product and design roles have the most negative leadership perceptions.” 5) Startup founders are the happiest people in tech.

My friend Christine Vallaure shares a few lessons learned building her educational platform as a company of one. Christine’s approach to running a business is truly inspiring, and she masterfully told her story at this year’s Config and in her new book Solo. (Which I genuinely recommend and she offers a coupon to my readers in the Friendly Promo above, which is not an ad.)