The next year’s Config will be in San Francisco, CA, on June 23–25. The call for speakers is open until November 7, 2025.

Raluca Budiu from Nielsen Norman Group with a sobering critique of Apple’s new visual language: ​“iOS 26 brings Liquid Glass controls laid over noisy backgrounds, jittery animated buttons, shrunken and crowded tab bars, collapsing navigation, and ubiquitous search bars. On top of that, it breaks long‑established iOS conventions, getting closer to Android design. Overall, Apple is prioritizing spectacle over usability.”

On transparency: ​“One of the oldest findings in usability is that anything placed on top of something else becomes harder to see. Yet here we are, in 2025, with Apple proudly obscuring text, icons, and controls by making them transparent and placing them on top of busy backgrounds.”

On animations: ​“Our eyes are finely tuned to detect motion, which is why animated buttons grab attention instantly. But delight turns into distraction on the tenth, twentieth, or hundredth time. […] It’s like the interface is shouting ​“look at me” when it should quietly step aside and let the real star — the content — take the spotlight. […] Motion for motion’s sake is not usability. It’s distraction with a side of nausea.”

I was looking forward to this update since WWDC, but it left me increasingly annoyed and disappointed. From hidden actions in Safari to blurred content with jittery transitions in Mail, everyday experiences require more attention and extra steps on my part without giving anything in return. Liquid Glass feels like an ultimate departure from Steve Jobs’ ​“design is not just what it looks like and feels like, design is how it works” motto.

Luke Wroblewski observes how AI coding agents flipped the traditional software development process on its head. Design teams used to stay ​“ahead” of engineering, but now engineers move from concept to working code 10x faster.

“So scary time to be a designer? No. Awesome time to be a designer. Instead of waiting for months, you can start playing with working features and ideas within hours. This allows everyone, whether designer or engineer, an opportunity to learn what works and what doesn’t. At its core rapid iteration improves software and the build, use/​test, learn, repeat loop just flipped, it didn’t go away.”

An early preview version of the new monospace font from Paper, based on Geist Mono from Vercel.

“Starting today, the Figma app in ChatGPT will be able to recommend and create AI-generated FigJam diagrams based on your conversation. Users can also upload files like photos, drawings, and PDFs to guide the output. That currently includes text-based flow charts, sequence diagrams, state diagrams, and Gantt charts, with more to come. […] To use the Figma app, simply mention it in your ChatGPT prompt, i.e., ​“Figma, make a diagram from this sketch.” ChatGPT can also suggest the Figma app when it’s relevant to the conversation.”

Dylan Field shows the new Figma app in ChatGPT in action with the tech tree generated out to the year 2100.

Pratik Nadagouda, Product Manager at Figma, shows how to use the upcoming Figma Make connectors to visualize PRDs and tasks with the help of 3rd-party services like Notion, Atlassian, Linear, or Asana.

Another use case for Connectors is pushing code from Figma Make to a GitHub repository, which can be used as a project backup or source for deployment to your preferred hosting platform. Future updates to the Make file can be manually pushed to the repository. Connectors will become available later in October.

Figma Make is pretty great for building custom diagrams for your research.

“Winners from our first global Make-a-thon offer insights on how to prototype smarter, structure products better, and push Figma Make further.”

Part II of Ridd and James McDonald working on Inflight.

Tommy Geoco shows his workflow for building Lorelight with Figma and Claude Code.

Mike Smith from Smith & Diction shares a working file with a refined visual identity for Contra. Love peeking behind the curtain.

The official Figma MCP server now supports Gemini CLI, OpenAI Codex, and Atlassian is coming soon.