Hugs and fractional units. Minimum viable tokens. Vanilla CSS.
What’s New
Figma turns 10
10 years since Figma launched on December 3rd, 2015. Congrats on a big anniversary!
Figma wants to make working with AI more like working with humans
Fast Company spoke with Figma’s head of AI, David Kossnick, about what the company has accomplished so far, where he’s trying to steer it, and why the tech industry needs to move past prompting and create experiences that are “more visual, more exploratory.”
Bad Dye Job
A lot was written last week about Alan Dye’s departure from Apple as VP of Human Interface Design to lead design at Meta as Chief Design Officer. I shared a few critical pieces about Liquid Glass in the last few months, and thought this story from John Gruber was quite telling: “After I published that post, I got a note from a designer friend who left Apple, in frustration, a few years ago. After watching Jobs’s Aqua introduction for the first time in years, he told me, “I’m really struck by Steve directly speaking to ‘radio buttons’ and ‘the key window’.” He had the feeling that Dye and his team looked down on interface designers who used terms like Jobs himself once used — in a public keynote, no less. That to Dye’s circle, such terms felt too much like “programmer talk”. But the history of Apple (and NeXT) user interface design is the opposite. Designers and programmers used to — and still should — speak the exact same language about such concepts. Steve Jobs certainly did, and something feels profoundly broken about that disconnect under Alan Dye’s leadership.”
Building the Boat While Staying Afloat
Great piece by Laura Escobar on what it’s like to be a founding designer: “Ship. Ship like your life depends on it. Because, for the life of the business, it depends on it. And to ship the right bets, you have to step away from just looking at pixels to understand what needs to get built and why.”
Also, this: “This doesn’t happen in isolation, which is why influence is the best design tool. Your job isn’t designing features. Your job at a startup is about staying alive. Treading water until a boat floats by, and then figuring out how to build a boat that matches the boat that floats by.”
Vanilla CSS is all you need
A really interesting look at modern CSS patterns that 37signals use in Campfire, Writebook, and Fizzy. No Tailwind, no build process, and lots of cutting-edge CSS with good browser support — custom properties (variables), native nesting, container queries, the :has() selector, CSS Layers for managing specificity, color-mix() for dynamic color manipulation, and clamp(), min(), max() for responsive sizing without media queries.
Figma Design
New Grid updates: Hug + fractional units
Huge update to Grids adds an option to hug content and introduces fractional units (fr in CSS). Tables are so much easier to design now.
Minimum viable color tokens
In his talk at Converge 2025, Luis Ouriach makes a compelling argument that we create too many design tokens — particularly for colors.
Figma Make
How Product Managers can use Make connectors
Designer Advocate Brett walks through a step-by-step guide on how you can use Make connectors to build better prototypes through Product Requirements Document prompts.
Figma tutorial: Intro to Figma Make
A quick video introduction to creating your first Figma Make file.