Last Tuesday, Figma rolled out the new pricing, which was announced in December. The design seats price increased, while Dev Mode seats remained unchanged and all paid seats now include FigJam and Slides. Admins got upfront approval over seat upgrades.

“Figma now transforms common character combinations into smart symbols in all fonts. Now when you type the following characters – ©, ®, ™, ->, <-, vv, ^^, \[ \] – Figma will automatically transform them into smart symbols: ©️, ®️, ™️, →, ← , ↓, ↑, ▢. This will occur with every font, as long as you have the ​“Use smart quotes/​symbols” preference on. Also available in FigJam and Slides.”

Dann Petty has been one of the most vocal Figma critics lately. (See his previous post for some context, or go all the way back to moving drafts drama in the summer.) I don’t think corporations need help defending themselves, but in this case, I see the situation from a different angle and want to share some thoughts.

First, I built my first Framer website recently and thought it was a compelling alternative for designing websites. It often takes me longer to prototype a throw-away interaction in Figma than to do it straight in code (especially with AI!), so designing and animating the actual website instead of a mockup felt refreshing. I missed some of the more advanced features (no variables, really?), but I’m sure they are on the roadmap. In the end, it wasn’t the right tool for this project, but I agree with Dann that similar tools will be ​“owning the web design market”. That said, they have nothing to offer product designers.

Here is the part I disagree with: “(People are) mad at Figma because they lost focus on designers and got over bloated with useless features no one wanted or needed and started to focus on developers and their Config event.” Dann doesn’t specify which features he considers useless, but I assume it’s those related to larger design systems and developer handoff. Personally, I rarely feel restricted while working on visual design, but often hit the wall with a lack of CSS grids, inability to replicate the props.children behavior in components, still incomplete variables support, barebones design system analytics, Dev Mode, prototyping, etc. On my product team engineers outnumber designers 5 to 1, so a lot of our time and attention is spent on cross-team alignment. These features might be useless to freelancers and agencies, but worth their weight in gold to product teams.

Lastly, a note on Figma becoming ​“incredibly expensive.” First, they kept the same $15/​m price of the Professional plan since 2018. According to the CPI Inflation Calculator, $15 in 2018 had the same buying power as $19.31 today — pretty close to $20. Second, at least in the US, $20/​m or $192/​year is not much for a pro tool — some of my streaming and newspaper subscriptions cost more. Third, it now includes two more products! My team just upgraded our Figma account to the Organization plan and it was cheaper to wait for the new pricing as we no longer needed separate licenses for FigJam and Slides. This will not be true for everyone, but not all seats increased in price while getting some perks.

Y Combinator President & CEO Garry Tan sits down with Dylan Field to discuss ​“the evolving world of design in the age of AI, the challenging early days of the company, and how his team forever changed the way designers and engineers collaborate.”

Luis Ouriach sat down with the Figma team to talk about craft – what is it, how do they define it, and how can you get better at it. This is the first out of three videos in a new mini-series called Blend Mode.

In this interview, Jay chats with product designer Kelly Li who shows how she redesigned Figma Community. You will learn about Kelly’s design process, A/B testing, sharing research findings, and design explorations for the Figma Community.

You can now turn any Figma design into a pixel-perfect full-stack app. Simply select a frame and put bolt.new in front of the Figma URL to start building rapid prototypes and production-ready apps. Made in partnership with AnimaApp, one of the best Figma-to-code tools.

Yi Shen continues improving his plugin, this time adding support for custom bend curves. Check out the curve editing video and the amazing animation that it enables.

Design tokens starter set with scalable predefined naming conventions organized into groups and subgroups. Comes with Figma variables and Tokens Studio-ready JSON on GitHub for a smooth start of your setup. ​“Simplify the overwhelming process of setting up design tokens with a clear, structured starting point for a scalable design system.”

I love mid-century modern architecture and furniture, and Herman Miller is one of the most iconic brands. Order created an identity system establishing a new but familiar foundation for their visual language, capturing and building on its rich history and influence. Incredible case study covering brand history and modern brand application. Don’t miss the identity guidelines website as well.

Monotype published a new kind of trends report for 2025: ​“Ancient oracles peered into the future. From a specific point in time, they forecast what could come. That’s what we want this report to be: a typographic oracle. We want to mark this moment in time, to celebrate design and typography’s progress, and to challenge all of us to envision what lies ahead by looking at the larger cultural forces shaping our time and work.”