Freshly baked goodies: FigPals for April Fun Week (extended until April 11); a button for collapsing layers — love that it excludes the layer tree of your selection; quality-of-life improvements to corner radius inputs and flyouts for effects, fills, and layout grids; reordering variables modes and collections; annotations in Design Mode; accessibility contrast in color picker; and finally, an eyedropper added to Dev Mode.

This one is a big ​“finally” for me! BRB, I have some library cleanup to do.

Annotations are now available in Design Mode with new color-coded categories. Love that categories are fully editable, so you can adjust them to your team’s workflow.

Detach is the premier after-party organized by Jesse Showalter, Tommy Geoco, Femke van Schoonhoven, and Soren Iverson on Wednesday, May 7 where the design community comes together to unwind, connect, and celebrate.

Another after-party on Thursday, May 8 organized by San Francisco UXD with a fully reserved venue that includes a bar, entertainment, and special guests and product demos.

Great post by an industry veteran Mike Davidson, offering a few suggestions to those feeling behind the AI wave already: ​“When it comes down to it, your future in design is the sum of all of your actions that got you here in the first place. The skills you’ve built, the artifacts demonstrated in your portfolio, your helpfulness as a teammate, your reputation as a person, and now more than ever, your curiosity to shed your skin and jump into an undiscovered ocean teeming with new life, hazards, and opportunity. Someone will invent the next CSS, the next Responsive Design, the next sIFR, the next TypeKit, the next IE6 clearfix, and the next Masonry for the AI era. That someone might as well be you.”

Karri Saarinen: ​“The idea that AI might ruin visual quality feels like a non-issue since there wasn’t much quality to ruin in the first place. […] My general view of AI is that it will just let us do more things, not take away things.”

An interesting take from The Culturist on why color is vanishing from our world: ​“The underlying theory in all of these cases is that while color is sensory, unstable, and chaotic, form is rational, stable, and pure. Once you see this bias, you begin to notice how deeply it has shaped the modern world — and how it helps explain our current retreat into colorlessness.”

Advocates Jake Albaugh and Chad Bergman wrote a tactical guide to collaborating with your developer counterparts, including common pitfalls, practical tips, and guidance on when to lean in.

Nick Babich explores his process of turning design into code using Lovable and Anima and shares the pros and cons of each tool.

Brett from Designjoy shows how to apply dithering in Figma using the Dither plugin.

“In this interview, Jay chats with Natasha Tenggoro who shows how she designed AI features for FigJam. You will learn about Natasha’s design process, AI design, presenting to leadership and more.”

Miggi breaks down his favorite features in Figma Slides, including automatically changing text color for accessibility, choosing slide templates from other decks, grid view, slide numbers, live interactions, and more.

Advanced search and rename features for variables.

Claire Butler: ​“A love letter to scaling from 10 to 1400 people and 0 to millions of users over a decade as Figma’s first marketing and business hire.” One of my favorite insights: ​“As a product marketer I’d been trained to lead with ​“benefits over features,” but with designers that didn’t work. They cared about what the tool could actually do. They’d believe the benefits once they experienced them.”