Ridd noticed that designers who can code spend more time sketching their ideas and less time in Figma. This approach isn’t common because it still takes too long to code designs, but AI will change that. What if instead of generating polished mockups from text prompts we used AI to turn wireframes into frontend code, applied our design system, and tweaked the visual direction based on the provided mood board? (This is just one of the ideas explored in the new section of Dive.) 

A free, branded link shortener for your Figma portfolios or design files with a fig.page domain and powerful analytics.

A retrospective on an issue with Make Designs from Noah Levin, a VP of Design at Figma. First, a reminder on how the feature works: “[…] Make Designs feature employs three parts: a model, some context, and a prompt. This feature currently uses a collection of off-the-shelf models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Amazon’s Titan model—the same generally available models that anyone can use—and we have not done any additional training or fine-tuning. To give the model enough freedom to compose designs from a wide variety of domains, we commissioned two extensive design systems (one for mobile and one for desktop) with hundreds of components, as well as examples of different ways these components can be assembled to guide the output.”

What went wrong: ​“We carefully reviewed the underlying design systems throughout the course of development and during a private beta. But in the week leading up to Config, new components and example screens were added that we simply didn’t vet carefully enough. A few of those assets were similar to aspects of real world applications, and appeared in the output of the feature with certain prompts.”

Artiom Dashinsky asked a lawyer to check how Figma AI affects his work’s copyright. The good part: ​“You own the copyright for your work. You also own the copyright for the work Figma generates for you with AI.” The bad part: ​“Let’s say you create a mood board with screenshots of others’ designs. You don’t own the copyright for these designs, but now you’ve allowed Figma to train their AI on it. Now you’ve violated the copyright of the original owner.”

Noah Jacobus from Font Awesome shows how to preserve monotone and duotone icon overrides by maintaining consistent layer names and using boolean unions.

A quick tip from Miggi on using grids to generate type scale and place graphics.

Ana Boyer helps design system teams ensure designers get library updates not by copying main components into their working files.

I designed my resume in Figma but didn’t know that the exported PDF isn’t compatible with ATS systems used by HRs. Good tip from Kris Puckett!

Figma Slides was launched two weeks ago, and now the team is shipping 10 improvements in 10 days. The first drop: view layers in the Design mode while in the grid view.

Day 2: Hit Shift‑D or toggle the right end of your toolbar to access your Design mode.

Day 3: Add template text styles in the Design mode instead of jumping between modes.

Day 4: Click the right arrow to advance slides and play videos.

Coming soon: ​“An AI assistant that does the boring stuff for you. MATE supports you in your small boring tasks, allowing you to focus on the not boring things. Ask it to rearrange elements, create a color palette, change the stroke for hundreds of items, apply random opacity to selected items, rename variables, and much more.”

Daniel Destefanis made a new plugin for generating circular dot patterns inspired by Dieter Rams.

Bloomberg: ​“An investor group including Coatue Management, Alkeon Capital Management and General Catalyst Partners have invested in Figma Inc. as part of a deal that values the design startup at $12.5 billion, according to people with knowledge of the matter. ¶ The deal comes as the San Francisco-based company is delivering annual recurring revenue of more than $700 million, a figure that is projected to surpass $1 billion by next year, one of the people said, asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public. Yearly recurring revenue stood at about $400 million in late 2022.”