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.”

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.

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.

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.

Marek Minor, founder of Amsterdam studio Minor Adventures, spent about a year drawing Cursor’s 600+ icons in two sizes and two styles, every exploration by hand. The rule I keep thinking about: ​“Cursor’s pointer runs from bottom left to top right, and so does every icon that could go either way.” Slashes run the opposite way, because a slash cancels a direction and should cut against it.

“Gotta be honest, the hardest part of this whole project was the symbol. (Let’s be real, when is it not?)” Mike Smith on why Calendly’s new mark ended up back at ​“a cool C”. The company doubled down on its name equity, and anything figurative sitting next to the word Calendly just makes you ask why it isn’t a calendar. Dozens of explorations to arrive at the clear answer, then one asymmetrical ripple to make it theirs.

How Grok Bot was designed for agents that persist beyond a single session — from a chat history to a Bot roster, presence, a computer of the Bot’s own, and work that starts without a prompt.

“The more prominent we made the computer, the more the product encouraged users to supervise it.” The team tried four ways to show bot’s computer: floating window, side by side, modal, and full screen. Each one pulled the user into operating the machine. The shipped design has three levels instead – a purple title-bar icon while the computer is active, a pinned preview panel, and a full-screen takeover only when the Bot asks for help.

Backyard Baseball, remade as an industry draft board. Ridd and Tommy Geoco put the design Twitter on a bleacher as cartoon kids, each with a scouting report, a portfolio link, and a little prop at their feet. You fill seven slots (a design leader, two product designers, a web designer, a design engineer, a brand designer, and a wildcard) under a limited budget, based on the follower count. The amount of fun little details is absolutely mind-blowing, and you’ll catch them only by exploring the community and drafting the dream team. Now, please excuse me as I go send some paper planes.

Same premise as Backyard Designers above, except Gabriel Valdivia built the whole game. Craftdeck is a playable CCG with mana, taunts, campaign bosses, and hundreds of designers pulled from real X profiles. Look for me as the Open Palette with a Version Control ability — this checks out.

Drew Wilson, founder of Opacity and the person behind ValioCon, is teasing another game that renders designers as horses, each with a custom neigh sound. I don’t want to spoil the end result, but please go check it out.

Anthony Hobday on why most design career advice comes from people who don’t hire designers and reflects a single lucky path. The practical core: a five-minute curriculum, ways to look impressive without impressive jobs, and the signs an org genuinely values interface design. His argument that one strong credential can cover for a weak portfolio pairs neatly with ​“Components Are Dead” below — both circling what actually holds value as the job changes.

Luis Ouriach makes the provocative case that when LLMs make code cheap to write, edit, and migrate, the contribution model and the component-as-source-of-truth lose their reason to exist. His point is that consistency was always carried by tokens, not components, so a well-defined token set could govern ten different LLM-generated inputs at once. He stops short of full obituary, asking whether components live on as the unit of constraint.

Rauno Freiberg, a design engineer widely respected for his UI craft, keeps a running collection of short notes on the small decisions that make interfaces feel right. One entry works through why an animation delay meant to highlight a scrolled-to message backfired and felt more awkward; another walks through the redesign of cards. It’s the kind of thinking-out-loud that can teach more than any tutorial.

Just updated my annual Config Study Guide with the remainder of the recordings — all 70 talks are now organized and ready to watch. (Only the Learning Lab videos are still unavailable.) This is a practical way to work through the talks at your own pace, mark what you’ve watched, and trade recommendations with friends and colleagues.

New weekly live show by Ridd and Tommy Geoco, focused on design, tools, and the people behind the software.

A large survey of tech workers in 2026 finds the industry splitting into two groups: roughly half feel amplified by AI, while 14% feel destabilized and 12% are simply resentful. Designers and researchers are overrepresented in the fragile half. What’s striking is that the fear isn’t ​“AI will take my job” — only 22% name that. The bigger worry is unsustainable pace and doing more work for the same pay. Career optimism is down, burnout is up, and 53% would actively discourage someone from entering their field.

Dylan Field’s own Config 2026 recap, covering all six announcements at once: Code Layers, Figma Motion, Shader fills and effects, Generative Plugins, Weave Tools, and the Figma Agent. His framing: ​“AI has lowered the floor, but it has not raised the ceiling. Designers, creatives, builders: You will raise the ceiling.” A deliberate pushback against the narrative that AI replaces creative work.

Dylan Field opens Config 2026 by settling the design-vs-code debate once and for all: ​“Code is not the opposite of design. Code is material for design.” The keynote’s headline feature, Code Layers, puts live interactive code directly on the canvas alongside design layers, with a shared agent chat so teams can explore and riff together rather than each going a hundred prompts deep alone. From the same team: Figma Motion in beta, a full timeline-based motion tool with shader effects, 3D transforms, and export to MP4, GIF, and animated SVG. Worth watching in full: the Weave AI tools and custom shader section is genuinely impressive, and the generative plugin demos near the end show where the platform is heading.

A fresh edition of my annual Config Study Guide, with all recordings grouped by day, organized by stage (from larger to smaller), and color-coded by theme. The stage size is a good cue for how important organizers considered a specific talk — I recommend starting from the top of deep dives and themes you’re interested in. Some talks haven’t been published yet, so the study guide will be updated.

I make this resource because even while attending in person, I can only make it to a small fraction of talks I’m interested in. Use the Stamp tool to mark the talks you want to watch or have already watched, add your thoughts with stickies, and share your version of this file with friends.

Marcin Wichary, Design Architect at Figma, made this interactive essay about fingers, latency, and why our interfaces still fail the hands using them. Starting with 1890s typists who routinely hit 70 wpm when scientists said 40 was the ceiling, he traces a direct line from terminal echo buffers and UI blocking to Notes on a Mac that can’t keep up with your typing in 2026. The embedded demos — where you feel the difference between a blocked UI and a parallel thread — do more to explain debouncing and latency than any amount of text could. This essay is a fantastic companion to Marcin’s Unsung blog on software craft and quality.

Nikita Prokopov makes the case that great UI isn’t just about nailing the start and end states of an animation, it’s about every frame in between. His rule of thumb: if you freeze the screen at any moment, you should be able to explain what you’re looking at. The post walks through a set of GIF examples — from Safari’s misaligned cursor-and-placeholder animation to YouTube’s inexplicable rectangle transition — showing how mid-animation frames that don’t hold up on their own erode user trust.

“As code becomes cheaper, an increasingly large portion of it is written for prototyping, not production.” Yitong Zhang argues that prototype coding and production coding are diverging into distinct disciplines with near-opposite requirements: prototyping wants speed, mock data, no types, no tests, and wide-ranging agents; production wants the opposite. Cursor, Stripe, and Notion have already shown this with their internal playground environments — and Figma just needs to follow that path. Parallel design exploration means more inference runs, less complexity per run, and better margins than production – making Figma one of the best-positioned companies outside the labs to run agents at scale.

“Behind products that just ​‘feel good’, there is an insane amount of design and engineering that you never get to see.” Enri Tarta got rare access to Figma’s product team for a day, and the result is the kind of process tour we almost never get to see.

A design vocabulary guide by Emil Kowalski and Glenn Carstens-Peters. 188 terms across 12 categories — typography, color, layout, IA, accessibility, measurement — defined with the precision designers reach for when they actually know what they’re looking at. It’s a preview of a larger ​“design education for an era of change” arriving fall 2026.

The Community profile redesign adds role, experience, tech stack, pinned work with images and links, and social channels. Combined with the FigPal customization, it reads less like a profile page and more like a creator landing page. Figma clearly wants Community to function as a discovery layer for designers, not just for resources.

Soleio’s guest is Rasmus Andersson: founding designer of Spotify, one of Figma’s first designers, co-creator of GraphQL, and creator of Inter. The part that stayed with me is his description of how Figma operated: one person on one problem for a year, sometimes binned at the end, while shipping something visible every month. He also makes a case that the production side of design — the part AI is eating fastest — was never actually the hard part. What’s left is the intention. The other link in this section is Soleio’s talk on the geometry of luck, making this pair worth watching together.

“Luck isn’t something that you have. It’s something that you leave behind.” Soleio — designer of the Like button and angel investor in Figma, Cursor, and Framer — delivered this as the closing line of his Tokyo Design Forum talk, and it’s the kind of sentence that reorganizes how you think about a career. The talk, now archived by The Forum Library, reframes luck as a generative force you shape through how you live and work, not a resource you accumulate.

Matt Colyer, Figma’s director of product management for developers, makes the case on Dan Shipper’s AI & I podcast that the SaaS apocalypse narrative has it exactly backwards. He’s been running his own agents for two years and is buying more software subscriptions than ever, because shipping and maintaining a personal agent teaches you fast why people pay for someone else to run it. The more interesting half is about design specifically: chat is linear, which makes it good at converging on a single direction but terrible at generating lots of options. Figma’s on-canvas agent is a first attempt at the divergent side — letting you branch frames in different directions, then bring in a convergent agent to cluster them. He also walks through how the MCP server closes the code-to-design loop, and why ​“review” has quietly become the biggest bottleneck in AI-assisted product work.