ChatGPT now has Sketch (type “@Sketch”, draw a rough layout, get it rendered), templates for formats like posters and merch, comments pinned directly onto an image for focused edits, and shareable prompts so someone else can run your idea on their own photos. That’s a design tool’s vocabulary showing up inside a chat. Generation latency is reduced by up to 50% compared with Images 2.0, it’s live on every ChatGPT tier including free, and developers get two new API models: Flare as the default, Sunburst for precision work with longer generation times.

Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger are taking the Tailwind Labs to Shopify. Tailwind CSS stays MIT-licensed and the same people keep leading it, but the business around it ends – both Tailwind Plus and ui​.sh are closed to new signups.

The framework is installed over 110 million times a week, but in January Adam had to lay off three of his four engineers with revenue down close to 80%. As AI agents read the docs developers no longer do, and the docs were selling the templates that funded the framework. Building a business around the open-source framework is incredibly hard, so I’m glad Shopify is ready to foot the bill.

“It’s hundreds of little decisions done right. How you do anything is how you do everything.” Dennis Brotzky wrote a reflection a year after Wealthsimple acquired Fey, the highest craft investment research app he built with Tom Russ and Thiago Costa. The three of them were dropped into a thousand-person org, and within a year they had killed the last AngularJS route, shipped a new art direction, and replaced the old Patchwork design system with Mint, built on Base UI and designed AI-first with agent skills so that ​“the defaults carry the taste.” Worth reading if you have ever had to argue that the unglamorous foundation work is the design work.

The detail I keep thinking about: ​“We found buttons are tough to tap when they land right in the fold.” So Apple built fold avoidance into sheets, alerts, menus, and toolbar buttons, all of which nudge themselves aside whenever iPhone Duo is partially folded, while scrollable content stays where it is. Adopt the system components and you get the behavior for free.

Matt Ström-Awn argued back in 2022 that picking a categorical color palette is an optimization problem rather than a taste problem. Version 2 ships that argument as an actual tool – an npm package, a CLI, and a GUI at cat​e​go​ry​col​ors​.com. Palettes export as raw values, CSS custom properties, or DTCG JSON, which is the part that matters if you’re feeding the result into a design system.

Marcin Wichary gave Unsung, his blog about software craft, its first proper design in time for the 500th post. He wanted something that ​“steered clear of the preeminent AI aesthetic,” and landed on a factory green he kept spotting in real places, ​“beautiful in its own pedestrian way.” Warbler for body text, Bild for the sans, a modified Neonoir for the logo, all of it holding the old tenets: no rounded corners, no shadows, no blurs, and a general distrust of symmetry.

Rogie King on how generative shaders went from a vibe-coded ​“FigGPU” prototype to the Config keynote in two months. The detail I keep coming back to: progressive blur took the Figma Draw team months to build, and Rogie recreated the same effect with one or two prompts. He’s also honest about what didn’t work – his working prototypes were great for designers and useless as references for engineers, PMs, and stakeholders, so the team backed up to static Figma mocks to get alignment first.

Piers Cowburn opens his shaders file for Show Your Work series. The interesting trick: regular Figma effects apply after shaders, so to blur something before the shader reads it, you have to wrap it in a frame. Those soft gray fringes are exactly what his mosaic shader converts into color and shape.

Anthony DiSpezio, Designer Advocate at Figma, builds a Make kit from an npm package. Make auto-generates a starting version of the guidelines, and Anthony offers a few rules for making them more effective – assume the agent knows nothing, split guidelines into categories so it doesn’t drown in context, include real usage examples, and spell out the gotchas. Before publishing your kit, calibrate against the model’s pre-training biases and test how it actually reads your UI.

Karl Koch, Design Engineer at DuckDuckGo, published 11 custom skills to the Figma Community, ported from his open-source dxe set. Run /dxe orchestrator and you get his whole design engineering review in order: intent (write-first-design, subtractive-design), platform (semantic-html-first, modern-css-html), feel (fluid-design, interface-affordances, product-delight), bridge (design-engineering), then shipping (ai-output-judgement, prototype-to-production).