On July 9th, Friends of Figma chapters around the world organize a 24-hour virtual event featuring insights and experiences from makers, thinkers, and builders. Each participating Friends of Figma chapter hosts a one-hour session featuring local speakers and stories — creating a continuous, community-led experience that spans time zones and continents. The event is free and will be recorded; check out the massive agenda in multiple languages!

Ridd shares his new approach for vibe coding a side project. He treats ChatGPT as a CTO and Cursor as an engineer, with the CTO keeping all context about the project and breaking it down into chunks for an engineer to implement. I’ve been using a similar approach for a recent project with lots of moving parts and unknowns and it’s been working well. My only tip is to pick a smarter CTO in the form of an o3 model, maybe even employing Deep Research for the original plan.

“New in Dev Mode MCP Server: Annotations are included as design context. Generated code now benefits from both the structure of your design and your design intent.”

Kris Rasmussen, CTO of Figma: ​“When we announced Figma Sites at Config, we shared that we’ll be rolling out a CMS for it in the months ahead. Figma CMS will make life easier for marketers and designers who need to update website content, and Payload brings all the stuff developers love—a powerful, customizable backend for building scalable websites and apps, plus an intuitive admin panel for editors. By teaming up with Payload, we’re creating something special.”

This is huge! A few months ago, I wanted to use Framer for a marketing website but ended up recommending building a custom website only because its CMS was so lacking. When Figma announced that Figma Sites CMS is ​“coming soon”, I expected something just as barebones in the beginning. Getting a proper CMS in addition to code layers and Figma Make components makes Sites insanely customizable and powerful.

Figma acquired Payload, an open-source Next.js CMS. James Mikrut, founder of Payload: ​“Figma and Payload together can and will solve a problem that’s been bugging me (and probably all of you) for years. The gap between design and code still exists. Designers create in Figma, then devs recreate in code, then content teams struggle to maintain it all. It’s inefficient and frustrating. And historically, the CMS tends to make it worse. With Figma, we can (and will) solve these problems in new ways without compromising.”

James Mikrut, founder of Payload, also joined one of my favorite podcasts, Syntax, to chat with Wes Box about being acquired by Figma. They discuss building an open-source business, the future of UI design, AI interfaces, and what this means for the future of Payload and Figma.

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.