Slots! Prototypes. Config speakers.
Sponsor
ai.to.design — ChatGPT 5.3 Codex now available in 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
Our Config 2026 Speakers on the Biggest Opportunities With AI
A first look at Config 2026 speakers — AI artist Holly Herndon, creator of the world’s first 3D-printed fashion collection Danit Pele, designer and author Vicki Tan, designer and founder Matthew Ström-Aw, and mathematician and educator Grant Sanderson from 3Blue1Brown. Config returns to San Francisco on June 23–25. Virtual registration is free.
Workflow lab: AI image tooling and interactive prototyping in Figma
The new Workflow Lab format, showing an end-to-end process, is a smart way to frame the new AI image tools in context. The three new tools (erase object, isolate object, expand image) are genuinely useful for anyone who’s had to leave Figma to do basic cleanup in Photoshop, and Vectorize finally removes a step that’s been a quiet annoyance for years.
Prototype Code Is Not Production Code (And That's Okay)
Patrick Morgan makes a clean distinction that vibe-coding discourse keeps blurring: prototype code is for exploration, production code is for endurance. He is building a protected prototyping environment using Claude Code, a place where his team can move fast and then deliberately port the right assets across the boundary into production.
There is a clear parallel with how the design team at Notion works. In the recent episode of How I AI, Brian Lovin showed their collaborative “prototype playground,” where the entire team can create, share, and iterate on functional prototypes.
That also reminded me of how my team worked a decade ago, back when front-end development was a tad simpler. We had a separate “mockups” directory inside the Rails monorepo, where designers prepared static HTML mockups with production-ready CSS and JS. By the time designs were handed off to engineers in a feature branch, all polish and design details were already baked in. The design team must be fairly technical, but there is no going back to handing off Figma files after working this way.
Slots
Create flexible components with Slots
Slots are finally here! This hands-on tutorial explains building flexible components with Slots and covers the practical workflow, from setting up a slot inside a component to configuring preferred instances so designers know exactly what content belongs there.
It’s time to pay respect to the original “slot component” technique, shared by Ridd back in 2021. Thanks for your service, you’ve served us well.
Getting started with Slots
How to Supercharge your Design System with Slots
Figma Design
Building frontend UIs with Codex and Figma
GitHub Copilot to Figma
Create multiple component mappings in Code Connect UI
Figma Make
What if a newspaper could print itself?
AI
How Martin built the new Equals website with AI
How I use Claude Code as a Designer at Shopify
How I use Cursor to Automate boring design work
In this interview, Jay chats with Elad Mizrahi, who is building a working Figma widget in under an hour with Cursor AI. The appeal for designers is obvious: widgets are notoriously finicky to set up from scratch, and using an AI coding agent to handle the boilerplate means you can stay focused on the logic and behavior rather than the scaffolding.
Plugins
Figma 3D Tilt
Cool Thing
History of Software Design
An upcoming interactive exhibit restoring the design moments that shaped software history, from Xerox Alto’s Smalltalk-76 interface to the original “slide to unlock” on iPhone. Each restoration requires reverse-engineering details, motion, and behavior from low-quality assets.