10 years since Figma launched on December 3rd, 2015. Congrats on a big anniversary!

Fast Company spoke with Figma’s head of AI, David Kossnick, about what the company has accomplished so far, where he’s trying to steer it, and why the tech industry needs to move past prompting and create experiences that are ​“more visual, more exploratory.”

A lot was written last week about Alan Dye’s departure from Apple as VP of Human Interface Design to lead design at Meta as Chief Design Officer. I shared a few critical pieces about Liquid Glass in the last few months, and thought this story from John Gruber was quite telling: ​“After I published that post, I got a note from a designer friend who left Apple, in frustration, a few years ago. After watching Jobs’s Aqua introduction for the first time in years, he told me, ​“I’m really struck by Steve directly speaking to ​‘radio buttons’ and ​‘the key window’.” He had the feeling that Dye and his team looked down on interface designers who used terms like Jobs himself once used — in a public keynote, no less. That to Dye’s circle, such terms felt too much like ​“programmer talk”. But the history of Apple (and NeXT) user interface design is the opposite. Designers and programmers used to — and still should — speak the exact same language about such concepts. Steve Jobs certainly did, and something feels profoundly broken about that disconnect under Alan Dye’s leadership.”

Yann-Edern Gillet adopted his original talk at Granola’s Design Engineering Night into an article: ​“The real Rosetta Stone didn’t solve languages, it overlapped them. Same meaning, carved three times, so people could decode one through the other. Design engineering is the same: we’re constantly trying to express intent twice — once visually, once in code, without losing the meaning in between. When the languages don’t match, the wall gets thick. When they overlap, the wall becomes translucent. And when the overlap is high enough… the wall disappears. It becomes glass. I think that overlap, that shared percentage of language, is the real definition of velocity.”

In the latest episode of Boz to the Future, Meta CTO Andrew ​“Boz” Bosworth sits down with Dylan Field: ​“Boz and Dylan dive deep into the intersection of technology and creativity, from the early days when designers were scarce to today’s collaborative, cloud-based workflows. They talk about the imminent paradigm shift in interfaces and what comes after text prompting. They discuss what stays evergreen despite rapid technological change, and why the pursuit of craft remains fundamentally human.”

Max Woolf ran experiments with image generation models and was really impressed with Nano Banana 2.5 — note that this blog post was published before Google introduced the new Pro version. ​“After running Nano Banana through its paces with my comically complex prompts, I can confirm that thanks to Nano Banana’s robust text encoder, it has such extremely strong prompt adherence that Google has understated how well it works.”

Config is returning to San Francisco on June 23–25, 2026, and early bird tickets are available with a 50% discount ($450 instead of the regular $899) for a limited time.

“For years, India’s design and developer community has pushed the boundaries of what’s possible in Figma. Now, with our new hub in Bengaluru, we are excited to meet these builders where they are—and learn firsthand how they’re reimagining what’s next and shaping the future of product development in India.”

A new survey, based on ten in-depth interviews with 340 people, reveals that product designers are facing high stress, burnout, and slow career progression, largely due to chaotic organization, poor management, and unpredictable communication within the tech industry.

Dylan Field on the newest addition to Figma’s product line: ​“Figma has acquired Weavy, a platform that brings generative AI and professional editing tools into the open canvas. As Figma Weave, the company will help build out image, video, animation, motion design, and VFX media generation and editing capability on the Figma platform.”

In A Match Made in Heaven, Weavy’s early investor, Ben Blumenrose from Designer Fund, shared three key features of their product approach that make for a very powerful tool — being model agnostic, exposing process, and working as an aggregator.

I’ve been waiting for this video and kept thinking about it long after watching. To kick off his new series This is taste, Tommy Geoco flew to Kalamazoo, MI, to spend two days with Ridd. His Dive Club interviews show where the puck is going to be for the design industry and have been my most recommended resource for a long time. Tommy did a great job showing the actual person behind the online persona through his environment, family, motivation, and process of building the Inflight and Dive Club. Can’t wait for the future episodes of the series!

Earlier this year, Grammarly acquired collaborative workspace Coda and email app Superhuman, with the CEO from Coda stepping into the role of CEO for Grammarly and the entire company later changing its name to Superhuman. Smith & Diction developed an interactive identity with motion design at its core, while the brand architecture of the new company was evolving every day. The new icon system by Helena Zhang and custom pattern generators made in Figma Make show an incredible attention to detail from this team.

A reminder that Figma’s free virtual conference for the design systems community is happening this week on Tuesday, October 28, from 9:00 am to 2:00 pm PDT. Besides the keynote, I’m especially interested in talks ​“Spectacular slots” by Nathan Curtis and ​“Crafting design context for agentic coding workflows” by Jake Albaugh.

Sara Clayton from Dropbox shares some of her recent lessons and observations about experimenting with AI: ​“the design-to-engineering bridge is improving but not yet seamless, weak systems and shortcuts will be surfaced rather than hidden, true progress depends on internal champions who can push the boundaries, and – above all – critical thinking remains the foundation of good design.”

I shared some of my thoughts on Liquid Glass in issue #229, so it was refreshing to see how Linear approached the new design language. Couldn’t agree with this more: ​“The one effect we chose not to reproduce was Liquid Glass’s refraction. Technically, it requires access to pixel-level data that isn’t available to third-party developers. Aesthetically, it also wasn’t the right choice because refraction can make dense professional interfaces harder to read. By relying on precise blurs, masking, and lighting, we maintained a sense of depth without losing clarity.”

Schema — Figma’s conference for the design systems community — is back for the virtual livestream on Tuesday, October 28. Topics include the future of design systems, best practices for design and development with AI, and product updates to design systems in Figma.

Dylan Field comes to Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast to talk about keeping internal morale up after the Adobe acquisition fell through, his approach to maintaining pace and a sense of urgency 13 years in, how to systematically develop taste, how Figma decides which product lines to add, why he obsesses over ​“time to value”, and how AI is making design more valuable. Don’t miss Lenny’s biggest takeaways from this conversation.

Erik D. Kennedy attempts to answer two questions: Will AI take design jobs? If so, which ones? And in light of that, what should designers focus on? Love this advice: ​“I’d recommend steering your own designs away from the hallmarks of UI-by-AI: Inter, cards displayed in parallel, everything being 8px rounded, etc. The time to know your brand, know your audience, know the problem you’re solving, and lean way in starts now.”

The next year’s Config will be in San Francisco, CA, on June 23–25. The call for speakers is open until November 7, 2025.

Raluca Budiu from Nielsen Norman Group with a sobering critique of Apple’s new visual language: ​“iOS 26 brings Liquid Glass controls laid over noisy backgrounds, jittery animated buttons, shrunken and crowded tab bars, collapsing navigation, and ubiquitous search bars. On top of that, it breaks long‑established iOS conventions, getting closer to Android design. Overall, Apple is prioritizing spectacle over usability.”

On transparency: ​“One of the oldest findings in usability is that anything placed on top of something else becomes harder to see. Yet here we are, in 2025, with Apple proudly obscuring text, icons, and controls by making them transparent and placing them on top of busy backgrounds.”

On animations: ​“Our eyes are finely tuned to detect motion, which is why animated buttons grab attention instantly. But delight turns into distraction on the tenth, twentieth, or hundredth time. […] It’s like the interface is shouting ​“look at me” when it should quietly step aside and let the real star — the content — take the spotlight. […] Motion for motion’s sake is not usability. It’s distraction with a side of nausea.”

I was looking forward to this update since WWDC, but it left me increasingly annoyed and disappointed. From hidden actions in Safari to blurred content with jittery transitions in Mail, everyday experiences require more attention and extra steps on my part without giving anything in return. Liquid Glass feels like an ultimate departure from Steve Jobs’ ​“design is not just what it looks like and feels like, design is how it works” motto.

Luke Wroblewski observes how AI coding agents flipped the traditional software development process on its head. Design teams used to stay ​“ahead” of engineering, but now engineers move from concept to working code 10x faster.

“So scary time to be a designer? No. Awesome time to be a designer. Instead of waiting for months, you can start playing with working features and ideas within hours. This allows everyone, whether designer or engineer, an opportunity to learn what works and what doesn’t. At its core rapid iteration improves software and the build, use/​test, learn, repeat loop just flipped, it didn’t go away.”

Wes Bos from the Syntax podcast and Adam Wathan from Tailwind CSS dig into why every single website AI puts out is purple.

Emil Kowalski shares seven simple ideas you can use to improve your animations: scale your buttons, don’t animate from scale(0), don’t delay subsequent tooltips, choose the right easing, make your animations origin-aware, keep animations fast, and use blur when nothing else works. 

Jake Cooper: ​“When something is labored on, obsessed over, etc, it has no choice but to become of quality, because we give a part of ourselves to it.” This, also: ​“We must choose to build quality things. They will take longer, more work, but in return we will be able to enjoy a life full of rich tastes and experiences.”

Max Stoiber notes how traditional design handoffs are a thing of the past at Shopify. Agree with this: ​“the hard part of making prototypes real is not ​“turning static drawings in Figma into HTML & CSS” anymore. AI can do that perfectly in seconds. What’s left is: backend implementations, wiring up the data fetching, handling state… None of which is ​“handoff.”

For most of my career, I owned both design and front-end code on products I worked on. This combination of skills used to be a (somewhat) rare differentiator, but became ubiquitous with AI. That said, for AI to work ​“perfectly in seconds” requires an extensive setup with an advanced design system shared between Figma and code. Without this foundation, prototyping designs for real apps still requires some technical knowledge. These days, I often use Figma Make for quick experiments and proofs of concepts before switching to the actual codebase and prototyping the final version with Cursor (fully adopted by the design team at Shopify as well).

Speaking of Cursor, Lee Robinson recorded a six-part video series on AI foundations. It’s designed for beginners to learn concepts like tokens, context, and agents. The entire course is free and just 1 hour long.

Peter Yang interviews Meaghan Choi, a design lead for Claude Code, about her Figma-to-code workflow and the top 3 design use cases for Claude Code.