Dylan Field: ​“Figma and Adobe have reached a joint decision to end our pending acquisition. It’s not the outcome we had hoped for, but despite thousands of hours spent with regulators around the world detailing differences between our businesses, our products, and the markets we serve, we no longer see a path toward regulatory approval of the deal.”

The Verge with some context on what exactly happened: ​“Last month, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) provisionally determined that the deal would harm the product design software market should it go ahead — effectively blocking the acquisition until Adobe addressed the regulator’s concerns, which involves the divestiture of ​‘overlapping operations’ like Figma Design and the company’s competing Adobe XD app. A response to the CMA’s request for remediations, dated December 14^th, was published on the Authority’s website on Monday. In short, Adobe is refusing to make any of the suggested compromises to ease the CMA’s concerns, saying a divestment is ​‘wholly disproportionate.’ Adobe said in the statement that it disagrees with the CMA’s findings, and that ​‘no remedy package that preserves the benefits of the transaction will be sufficient to resolve the competition concerns.’”

The ​“compromise” suggested by CMA is pretty wild: ​“The CMA’s recommendations don’t leave Adobe much wriggle room: either Adobe has to sell off Figma Design — Figma’s main product offering and, likely, the biggest motivation behind Adobe’s merger bid — or the deal is blocked entirely.”

Soleio, an early designer at Facebook, is now one of the best-known designers turned investors. He shared a story on the Design MBA podcast about investing in Figma’s seed round in 2012, which became his highest-performing investment.

I wonder what that button on Jordan’s micro keyboard does?

In the second part of his monumental article, Luis covers ​“how to build adaptable, indexable, logical, and specific components as part of the FRAILS framework.” (The two-part series was strategically published before the Christmas break, giving you some extra time to read it.)

Molly Hellmuth recommends dividing design system assets into four files for increased flexibility and improved performance. These include Foundations, Icons, Components, and a separate design file with ​“local” assets.

How to preserve a button’s volume across multiple themes? Ridd suggests combining brand variables with a style wrapper for reusing gradients.

Double Glitch reproduced in Figma a cool (or should I say ​“frozen”? Sorry!) effect first created by Marcus Eckert for the Riveo app. This cursor-tracking prototyping technique is getting wild!

Fons Mans explains how to create an image fade effect in Figma.

A free and ever-expanding design system and UI kit for Figma from Lemon Squeezy. Fantastic resource from a talented team!

Vijay shared his collection of loader prototypes in the community.

John LePore is ​“designing the future” through his work on futuristic interfaces for films, video games, and the automotive industry, including the Hummer EV. He offers his own take on the recently announced Porsche’s bespoke interface for Apple CarPlay. Great presentation and deep thinking behind his choices.

Fascinating side-by-side comparison of Midjourney 5.2 and the newly released version 6. The generative art from Midjourney has always felt more realistic and interesting compared to other services, and now the gap appears even larger.

“All the essential resources for setting up the design system.” A solid guide and a collection of interviews with design systems practitioners.