Getting hired in 2026. Design harness. Wave tools.
Sponsor
Layer Conference, November 28–30, 2026
Attend Friends of Figma, Portugal's conference built for the community, by the community. Hear from, and meet some of the best voices the Friends of Figma and design communities have to offer from all around the globe, talking about themes like design systems, AI ethics, accessibility and even where design is heading. Join online, or try your luck with the in-person waitlist for Coimbra, Portugal.
What’s New
Dive Radio: How Designers Are Getting Hired in 2026
Ridd and Tommy spend two and a half hours on what Dive’s own talent network data actually shows: designers with 10+ years of experience account for about 45% of hires while 0 to 2 years accounts for about 7%, expected salaries at signup run around $200,000 against a bit over $215,000 actually paid, and the median from first meeting to hire is 38.4 days. The most uncomfortable stretch is the case that a FAANG résumé is no longer a positive signal on its own, with Decimals founder Danny confirming that people are “almost allergic to the big company logos.”
Anthropic's Head of Design on AGI-Maximalist Product Design
Soleio interviews Joel Lewenstein, Head of Design at Anthropic. Their roadmap comes from internal traction on half-baked vibe-coded prototypes rather than top-down planning, and new designers figure that out by pattern matching on who gets respect. Claude Design is a wrapper over Claude Code with a friendlier front end, and his own designers keep going back to the terminal, because the production codebase is the source of truth for the design system and the rules of how things work while Claude Design has to rummage through Google docs that aren’t.
AI
Make your own design harness
Will Newton, Staff Product Designer at Ramp, wrote up the demo he gave at the Design x AI event. His “design harness” is a folder with two text files: Rules.md tells the agent how to behave and what to never do, Design.md holds colors, type scale, spacing, component styles, and the philosophy behind them. Everything else (Paper, Figma via MCP, HTML prototypes, production code) hangs off that folder. No app, no plugin – just plain text an agent reads before it touches anything.
Figma Design
Minimize left navigation bar
Figma shipped an escape hatch for the left navigation rail without announcing it. Figma menu > View > Minimize left navigation bar, sitting right above Minimize UI (⇧⌘) but with no shortcut of its own.
Figma Motion
Figma Motion basics: Use shaders in your animations
Shaders apply either as fills that generate patterns, gradients, and textures, or as effects that modify how a layer looks, and both animate on keyframes. The last 10 seconds are the interesting part: you can describe the motion to the Figma agent and have it apply the shader with a first set of keyframes for you to adjust.
Figma Weave
Create on-brand content with your Figma designs in Weave workflows
Copy a frame from Figma Design, paste it into Figma Weave, and it becomes a node in your workflow. You choose which text and image layers the workflow can change, and the fonts, layout, and spacing stay exactly as designed. Edits sync both ways, so every connected asset stays current.
How to Create Custom Weave Tools for Figma
“Weave tools turn creative workflows into simple tools anyone can run from the Figma canvas. In this video, you’ll learn how to create a Weave tool from a workflow and publish it to the Figma community.”