This is my new favorite palette generator. After working on the Supa Palette plugin for a few years, Angelo Libero went deep on the new standalone tool. It offers an insane level of control — you can start with a preset like Tailwind CSS 4 and add new color palettes following their algorithm, or go into the Curve mode for full control over lightness, chroma, and hue. Accessibility checks are built in, and there are lots of export options.

Jakub Krehel shows how he uses AI every day as a design engineer. My process is very similar, but I still picked up a few things!

Ridd shares his mental model for deciding which tools to reach for when coding with AI. Also available as a Dive Club video.

In this talk from Hatch Conference, Jenny Wen, Design Lead at Anthropic and former Director of Design at Figma, explains why the traditional design process is outdated and no longer works for today’s tools and tech: ​“With AI accelerating prototyping, smaller teams doing more, and craft becoming a key differentiator, rigid processes are failing designers. Jenny shares real examples from Figma and Anthropic that show how great work actually gets made today. Starting from solutions, caring deeply about details, building intuition, skipping steps, and designing for delight.”

Jenny’s talk really resonated with me. Quickly trying and discarding solutions, iterating on details, and relying on intuition is how I prefer to work. Still, without formal collateral such as personas or problem statements, it can feel like taking a shortcut. I went through a phase of producing these artifacts, but often found them more useful for justifying decisions than making them. It finally clicked when I read Alan Cooper’s interaction design bible, ​“About Face,” a decade ago: a lot of these processes came from design consultancies. They have to learn a client’s business, do product discovery, solve a problem, and sell it to stakeholders in a short time before moving to the next client. The longer you work on a product, explore the problem space, and listen to users, the stronger your intuition gets, which lets you fast-forward and compress discovery and design process.

Tom Johnson: ​“It’s literally faster for me to build a concept inside of the actual codebase than it is to work in Figma. But the amount of versions and breadth of the final result is not up to the quality bar that I usually hold. I’m loving the speed, but the output is sloppy at times. So I’ve got this weird flow of Code → Code → Figma → Code → Figma. Repeat, reorder, etc. The issue is that the transition from Figma → code with their MCP is solid. […] But code → Figma… is a terrible flow.”

I often spend more time recreating a particular screen in Figma than actually designing the change. I’ve been beating on the Code Connect drum for a while as it has huge potential for connecting design and code components. Even though it was built to translate components from Figma to code, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work in reverse. Code Connect was announced almost two years ago (way before LLMs and MCPs got powerful), but because it’s locked behind Organization and Enterprise plans, it’s rarely discussed in the community or considered by plugin and tool makers.

Speaking of Tom, in this interview with Jay, he shows the DM he sent to Linear’s CEO to get an interview — and later the portfolio and case studies he used to land the job at Vercel.

Google’s Gemini team walks through how they use gradients, circles, and motion as a cohesive illustration system to make an unpredictable AI assistant feel legible, calm, and trustworthy. It’s interesting for anyone designing ​“thinking states” or multimodal assistants, because it shows specific visual strategies — directional gradients as energy flow, morphing shapes for cognition, motion tied to user gestures — instead of yet another generic ​“AI glow.”

“When a system is hard to approach, the design must be soft. This softness — conveyed through guided, pulsing gradient shapes, clear language, and transparent signaling — allows users to engage with the new system feeling secure and supported. The gradient can be many things through its animations: aspirational and uplifting, directional and instructional. But they remain soft and direct, and always looking forward; they’re deeply connected to the Google brand with room to grow, like the personified gradient, rippling and responding to voice.”

Stephen Haney is interviewed about the origin story and tech stack behind Paper, one of the most interesting design tools of a new wave. ​“Paper is a browser-based design tool focused on the early, exploratory phase of design. It gives designers a fast, expressive canvas to think visually, experiment freely, and play with things like shaders, gradients, and motion without worrying about handoff or engineering constraints.”

A new monthly publication for designers: ​“We’re witnessing the birth of a new kind of designer: The AI Designer. Designers who work in evals, prompts, and tool calls. Designers who have as much of a taste for models as they do for fonts. Designers who think in mental models, agents, and intelligence. There’s no textbook for this kind of design (and things change so fast, it wouldn’t make sense to write one). Instead, we need a field guide. A living record of our learnings, tips, tricks, fears, dreams, curiosities, and hot takes.”

The first article — The Rise of the Model Designer — interviews Barron Webster, AI Model Designer at Figma. If you’re curious what that role even means, read on.