Google’s Gemini team walks through how they use gradients, circles, and motion as a cohesive illustration system to make an unpredictable AI assistant feel legible, calm, and trustworthy. It’s interesting for anyone designing ​“thinking states” or multimodal assistants, because it shows specific visual strategies — directional gradients as energy flow, morphing shapes for cognition, motion tied to user gestures — instead of yet another generic ​“AI glow.”

“When a system is hard to approach, the design must be soft. This softness — conveyed through guided, pulsing gradient shapes, clear language, and transparent signaling — allows users to engage with the new system feeling secure and supported. The gradient can be many things through its animations: aspirational and uplifting, directional and instructional. But they remain soft and direct, and always looking forward; they’re deeply connected to the Google brand with room to grow, like the personified gradient, rippling and responding to voice.”

Stephen Haney is interviewed about the origin story and tech stack behind Paper, one of the most interesting design tools of a new wave. ​“Paper is a browser-based design tool focused on the early, exploratory phase of design. It gives designers a fast, expressive canvas to think visually, experiment freely, and play with things like shaders, gradients, and motion without worrying about handoff or engineering constraints.”

A new monthly publication for designers: ​“We’re witnessing the birth of a new kind of designer: The AI Designer. Designers who work in evals, prompts, and tool calls. Designers who have as much of a taste for models as they do for fonts. Designers who think in mental models, agents, and intelligence. There’s no textbook for this kind of design (and things change so fast, it wouldn’t make sense to write one). Instead, we need a field guide. A living record of our learnings, tips, tricks, fears, dreams, curiosities, and hot takes.”

The first article — The Rise of the Model Designer — interviews Barron Webster, AI Model Designer at Figma. If you’re curious what that role even means, read on.

Great conversation between Ridd and Kyle Zantos on how designers can actually build things with AI using Claude Code. Many tips are tactical and transferable to other tools like Cursor. A few things I’m going to try after listening to this episode are using Leva for playing with parameters and building skills encoding best practices from top design engineers. After this episode went live, Kyle published Design Motion Principles, a Claude Code skill for motion and interaction design audits, trained on Emil Kowalski, Jakub Krehel, and Jhey Tompkins.

I wrote about Vercel’s Web Interface Guidelines in the past, but now they’re available as a skill/​command for your agent.

MDS recorded a Figma tutorial video dissecting why Anthropic’s Claude app icons feel so satisfying and explaining how to recreate these animated icon components in Figma using Smart Animate.

Admins on Organization and Enterprise plans can now view historical AI credit usage data to better plan for future costs.

“Enterprise Key Management (EKM) allows your organization to encrypt Figma file data with your own AWS Key Management Service (KMS) keys. This provides your organization additional control over data at rest. You can grant, monitor, and revoke Figma’s access to the encryption key at any time.”

“In this episode of In Good Company, Nicolai Tangen speaks with Dylan Field, founder and CEO of Figma, about the ideas behind one of the most influential design platforms in the world. Field shares lessons from founding Figma at 19, navigating years of iteration before launch, and scaling with a strong product culture. They discuss taste, craft, and community, how AI is changing the creative process, and what it means to lead with optimism in a rapidly evolving tech landscape.”