Code to Canvas. FIG Q4. Make connectors.
Sponsor
ai.to.design — Prompt → Editable Figma
Generate editable Figma designs from AI — GPT, Claude, Gemini, you name it — without leaving Figma. Real layers. Real auto-layout. Not a screenshot.
What’s New
Software is culture
Figma’s editorial team revisits the most influential interactions of the last 20 years — alongside stories from designers and builders working now — to see how singular design decisions can grow to define an era, and how the next generation will be shaped by the products we build today.
User groups are now available
You can now bulk share resources like files and projects with user groups.
Faster tab navigation on the desktop app
The new tab menu replaces the three dot menu to make it easier to find and manage open files when your tab bar fills up.
$FIG 2025 Q4
Figma CEO Dylan Field on the software reckoning
Dylan Field joins Deirdre Bosa from CNBC for a pre-earnings interview and an announcement of the Code to Canvas partnership with Anthropic. Dylan argues that AI coding tools will dramatically lower the barrier for writing software, but product design and understanding human needs remain essential; AI cannot replace the judgment, taste, and empathy of designers and product teams. Figma is a collaboration and orchestration layer for this new world, where many more people can create software but still need a shared space to ideate, design, and align on what should be built.
Figma Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2025 Financial Results
Praveer Melwani, Figma CFO: “Q4 was our best quarter for net new revenue on record, as platform-led adoption across our customer base–including enterprise and international–powered durable growth at scale. We closed the year with 40% year-over-year revenue growth in Q4, an uptick in Net Dollar Retention Rate, and strong cash generation, with a 13% operating cash flow margin. Our healthy balance sheet and positive free cash flow gives us the flexibility to continue investing in AI and the platform while maintaining financial discipline for sustainable, long-term growth.”
Post Earnings with Figma CEO Dylan Field
Dylan interviewed post earnings on TBPN: “We discuss Figma’s growth, the rise of Figma Make, the shift from linear coding to a visual-first product loop, why taste becomes the real moat in an agent-driven world, and why design is the ultimate differentiator in 2026.”
AI
Cooking with constraints: A designer’s framework for better AI prompts
Greg Huntoon: “Every prompt needs clarity, context, and constraints. I’ve been building my own prompt framework, and this TC-EBC structure — Task, Context, Elements, Behavior, Constraints — has served me well. This kind of structure doesn’t just help you get better results — it’s aligned with what prompt engineers and system designers are converging on across disciplines.”
AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it
Siddhant Khare: “When each task takes less time, you don’t do fewer tasks. You do more tasks. Your capacity appears to expand, so the work expands to fill it. And then some. Your manager sees you shipping faster, so the expectations adjust. You see yourself shipping faster, so your own expectations adjust. The baseline moves. […] This is the paradox: AI reduces the cost of production but increases the cost of coordination, review, and decision-making. And those costs fall entirely on the human.”
First of Kind – Ryo Lu: The Way
“Ryo Lu pioneered new patterns for collaboration as founding designer at Notion. He now leads design at Cursor, shaping how software gets built through a fusion of design and engineering. In this conversation with Soleio, he explains Cursor’s approach to design and how the product will evolve to empower designers who build.”
How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Terminal
Pablo Stanley: “I’m a designer. For years, my world has been Figma, Sketch, Adobe. Nice GUIs with buttons and panels and things I could click. The terminal? That was a black rectangle where the dev team did hacker things. No buttons. No UI. Just a blinking cursor judging you for not knowing what ls ‑la meant. And now? My design tool of choice is the terminal.”
State of the Designer 2026: Designers are leaning into the messy middle
The State of the Designer report explores how designers around the world are upleveling their skills, keeping craft high, and turning new pressures into creative momentum. “For some designers, AI’s impact on product design can feel destabilizing, but beneath that uncertainty is an undercurrent of optimism—89% say they’re working faster, and 80% say they’re collaborating better. And despite fears that AI slop might degrade craft and quality, designers are actually finding the opposite to be true: 91% say that new AI tools improve their designs.”
Figma Design
From Claude Code to Figma: Turning production code into editable Figma designs
“Bringing Claude Code workflows directly into Figma lets developers, designers, and even hobbyists capture a real, functioning UI from a browser — in production, staging, or localhost — and convert it into editable frames on the Figma canvas. Code is powerful for converging — running a build, clicking a path, and arriving at one state at a time. The canvas is powerful for diverging — laying out the full experience, seeing the branches, and shaping direction collectively. Going from code to canvas helps teams move fluidly, so work can narrow when it needs to and open up when it’s time to collaborate.”
My guess is it’s based on the html.to.design technology that Figma acquired last year, which is a huge time saver and an essential part of my toolkit. I haven’t tested Claude Code to Figma yet, but the result in demos looks very similar to what I usually get from the plugin. Which makes me wonder why they limited it to Claude Code instead of making something like a universal “Send to Figma” browser extension?
“What do we need to see in Figma?”
Alex Barashkov is disappointed by this release, and I have to agree with some of his points. I spend more time in Cursor than Figma lately, and returning to a workspace without AI agents is always hard. In the most recent and relevant example, after importing a few screens from code to Figma, I had to manually replace fonts (no “Selection fonts” for bulk edits, so first had to test a few plugins) and colors (a bit easier but still cumbersome), then abstract repetitive elements into components. While doing this, I kept asking myself why I have to waste time on this when bots can do it in minutes.
The MCP Tool That’s Changing How I Use Figma
Joey Banks: “…trying Figma Console MCP has completely opened my eyes into what I can offload. Not because it replaces the enjoyable work that I was doing before, but because it handled some of the longer, more repetitive tasks so quickly, and actually so well. Creating 200+ variables took seconds, and mapping them to color swatch instances so the team could preview values was way easier than I expected.”
Variables for brand designers
Mallory breaks down how brand designers can use variables to scale brand expression in Figma. Learn what variables are, how they differ from styles, and how they support real brand use cases — from multi-brand systems to scalable templates.
In the file: Building Modern Product Workflows in the Age of AI
Sherizan and Nayanika from Botim share an inside look at how their team designs, builds, and scales product experiences using Figma. In this “In the File” livestream, they share how they structure files, manage components and variables, and collaborate across design and engineering to ship consistently at scale.
Figma Make
New Make connectors
From design system documentation and PRDs to user research and feedback, Make can now pull in context from across your product ecosystem. Figma added new featured connectors for Amplitude, Box, Dovetail, Granola, Marvin, and zeroheight. You can also connect Make to any remote MCP server by setting up a custom connector.
Once you’ve installed and authorized a Make connector, just hit @ in your Make file and start typing the connector name to pull external context directly into your prototype.
FigJam
All emojis are available in the FigJam stamp wheel
I missed the announcement a couple of weeks ago, but the stamp wheel now includes all emojis, which you can use as emotes or as stamps.
FigBrew
Why demand for designers is on the rise
Andrew Hogan: “In the AI era, companies need designers more than ever. In fact, our latest study suggests that AI is actually driving renewed momentum in design hiring. We unpack why that is, what hiring managers are prioritizing, and which skills designers need to get ahead.”
To follow up, watch Understanding Today’s Design Job Market, where Andrew speaks with Daniel Wert, CEO of Wert & Co., about this study and what it reveals about the current moment in the market. Together, they unpack the rebound in design hiring, the surge in demand for senior ICs, and the state of junior hiring. Daniel shares what he’s seeing firsthand from running design leadership searches across industries — and where companies may be thinking too short-term.
Why Design, Strategy, and Technology Are Inseparable
“Andrew Hogan sits down with Garkay Wong, author of The Art of Design Strategy, to explore how designers can better articulate the value of their work in an era of rapid technological change. Drawing on her experience across service design, innovation strategy, and consulting, Wong explains why many traditional business frameworks fall short and how design can play a stronger role in strategic decision-making.”
Understanding The Next Era Of Strategy With Tamara Moellenberg
“Andrew Hogan speaks with Tamara Moellenberg, associate partner at ReD Associates, about a strategy framework that goes beyond optimization and user-centricity. Drawing on anthropology, ethnography, and the social sciences, Moellenberg introduces the idea of “worlds” as a third wave of strategy, focused on culture, communities, and shared systems of meaning.”
Cool Thing
Designing a Slider for Feeling
In the previous issue, I wrote about the interior and UI of Ferrari Luce. Raja Vijayaraman was inspired by a temperature knob and rebuilt it for a touch screen. Really nicely done.
Detail
Rene Wang: “I’ve always noticed the small things. These details aren’t accidents. They’re decisions. Careful, intentional decisions made by people who care deeply about craft. […] Detail is a collection of these moments. It’s a study resource. A place to learn why great design feels great, not just what it looks like.”