Color search. Makeathon. The design process is dead.
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What’s New
The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it.
Jenny Wen leads design for Claude at Anthropic, and in the past, she was Director of Design at Figma, where she led the teams behind FigJam and Slides. At Lenny’s podcast, she lays out how AI is collapsing the classic “research → mock → iterate” workflow into two main jobs for designers: supporting rapid implementation alongside engineers, and setting shorter 3–6 month product visions that keep a swarm of agents and builders pointed in a coherent direction. Jenny describes the day-to-day at Anthropic as equal parts surfing internal prototypes, pairing with engineers, and doing last-mile implementation herself. She still sees Figma as critical for exploring many directions and fine visual decisions, but treats Claude as her primary stack for long-running tasks and front-end polish.
Release Notes, February Edition
A live walkthrough of all February launches across Figma products, plus a Q&A with CPO Yuhki Yamashita on where design and software are headed this year. Don’t miss an early preview of Slots, launching in open beta this Thursday.
Figma Makeathon
The Figma Makeathon is officially live! $100,000 in prizes are up for grabs. Check out the guidelines to get started.
Paper and Claude
Ridd walks through a workflow where Paper acts as a visual canvas that Claude can “proactively” explore and prototype in. The interesting bit is his framing of Claude Code as a coworker and Paper as a shared whiteboard. That’s exactly what I wanted when last week I commented on missing agents in Figma after spending more time in Cursor.
Figma Design
Inline search for library colors
You can now type directly in the hex code input to access your color variables and styles. Lots of smart details: enter a hex value and see all variables and styles using it, colors are surfaced based on the context, and related terms are baked into the new algorithm (i.e., finding your “danger” variable when searching for “error”).
Streaming
Cole Derochie from Shopify made a plugin for simulating an LLM streaming experience — make sure to check out the demo.
Building frontend UIs with Codex and Figma
Figma explains how its new MCP server lets Codex generate Figma Design files from live code and, in the other direction, use Figma frames as structured context for agentic code generation.
Figma Live: Codex to Figma with OpenAI
“Join Figma designer advocate, Ana Boyer and OpenAI product designer, Ed Bayes as they talk through roundtripping between code and canvas.”
Freelance illustrator shows her design process in Figma Draw
“Welcome to Deep Dive with Jay, a series where we will look inside the Figma files of top designers. In this interview Jay chats with Shreya, Senior Product Designer at Groww and freelance illustrator. You will learn how Shreya uses Figma Draw for freelance illustration projects.”
FigJam
Connect FigJam to Notion
FigJam is now available in Notion as a pre-configured MCP integration.