The AI team of Gather is joining Figma: ​“Second, our AI team is joining Figma. Over the past year, several team members have been exploring new ideas to make work more pleasant and productive, especially for people designing and building software. As we developed these concepts, we had the opportunity to meet the Figma team, and discovered a remarkable alignment in vision and values. We’re thrilled to announce that this group has entered an agreement to join Figma, where they’ll continue pursuing this important work.”

Weavy’s CEO Itay Schiff walks through his path from 25 years in high‑end VFX to building Weavy, and why Figma acquired it. Weavy lets you package complex node‑based AI flows into simple apps that 200+ teammates can use, baking in brand rules and references by default. It matters if you care about how Figma will operationalize AI beyond one‑off prompts — this is effectively ​“internal tools for creatives” hiding behind a friendly app layer.

Tom Johnson outlines a nine-step AI-heavy design workflow where he starts with messy voice transcripts, uses Claude and tools like Willow, Notion, or Granola to structure the problem, then lets AI generate a deliberately bad but functional app as a scaffold. This matters because it reframes AI’s weakness at UX as a feature: a cheap way to explore directions, expose edge cases, and pressure-test scope before committing to real craft in Figma and a proper engineering handoff.

This is my new favorite palette generator. After working on the Supa Palette plugin for a few years, Angelo Libero went deep on the new standalone tool. It offers an insane level of control — you can start with a preset like Tailwind CSS 4 and add new color palettes following their algorithm, or go into the Curve mode for full control over lightness, chroma, and hue. Accessibility checks are built in, and there are lots of export options.

Jakub Krehel shows how he uses AI every day as a design engineer. My process is very similar, but I still picked up a few things!

Ridd shares his mental model for deciding which tools to reach for when coding with AI. Also available as a Dive Club video.

In this talk from Hatch Conference, Jenny Wen, Design Lead at Anthropic and former Director of Design at Figma, explains why the traditional design process is outdated and no longer works for today’s tools and tech: ​“With AI accelerating prototyping, smaller teams doing more, and craft becoming a key differentiator, rigid processes are failing designers. Jenny shares real examples from Figma and Anthropic that show how great work actually gets made today. Starting from solutions, caring deeply about details, building intuition, skipping steps, and designing for delight.”

Jenny’s talk really resonated with me. Quickly trying and discarding solutions, iterating on details, and relying on intuition is how I prefer to work. Still, without formal collateral such as personas or problem statements, it can feel like taking a shortcut. I went through a phase of producing these artifacts, but often found them more useful for justifying decisions than making them. It finally clicked when I read Alan Cooper’s interaction design bible, ​“About Face,” a decade ago: a lot of these processes came from design consultancies. They have to learn a client’s business, do product discovery, solve a problem, and sell it to stakeholders in a short time before moving to the next client. The longer you work on a product, explore the problem space, and listen to users, the stronger your intuition gets, which lets you fast-forward and compress discovery and design process.

Tom Johnson: ​“It’s literally faster for me to build a concept inside of the actual codebase than it is to work in Figma. But the amount of versions and breadth of the final result is not up to the quality bar that I usually hold. I’m loving the speed, but the output is sloppy at times. So I’ve got this weird flow of Code → Code → Figma → Code → Figma. Repeat, reorder, etc. The issue is that the transition from Figma → code with their MCP is solid. […] But code → Figma… is a terrible flow.”

I often spend more time recreating a particular screen in Figma than actually designing the change. I’ve been beating on the Code Connect drum for a while as it has huge potential for connecting design and code components. Even though it was built to translate components from Figma to code, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work in reverse. Code Connect was announced almost two years ago (way before LLMs and MCPs got powerful), but because it’s locked behind Organization and Enterprise plans, it’s rarely discussed in the community or considered by plugin and tool makers.

Speaking of Tom, in this interview with Jay, he shows the DM he sent to Linear’s CEO to get an interview — and later the portfolio and case studies he used to land the job at Vercel.

Google’s Gemini team walks through how they use gradients, circles, and motion as a cohesive illustration system to make an unpredictable AI assistant feel legible, calm, and trustworthy. It’s interesting for anyone designing ​“thinking states” or multimodal assistants, because it shows specific visual strategies — directional gradients as energy flow, morphing shapes for cognition, motion tied to user gestures — instead of yet another generic ​“AI glow.”

“When a system is hard to approach, the design must be soft. This softness — conveyed through guided, pulsing gradient shapes, clear language, and transparent signaling — allows users to engage with the new system feeling secure and supported. The gradient can be many things through its animations: aspirational and uplifting, directional and instructional. But they remain soft and direct, and always looking forward; they’re deeply connected to the Google brand with room to grow, like the personified gradient, rippling and responding to voice.”

Stephen Haney is interviewed about the origin story and tech stack behind Paper, one of the most interesting design tools of a new wave. ​“Paper is a browser-based design tool focused on the early, exploratory phase of design. It gives designers a fast, expressive canvas to think visually, experiment freely, and play with things like shaders, gradients, and motion without worrying about handoff or engineering constraints.”

A new monthly publication for designers: ​“We’re witnessing the birth of a new kind of designer: The AI Designer. Designers who work in evals, prompts, and tool calls. Designers who have as much of a taste for models as they do for fonts. Designers who think in mental models, agents, and intelligence. There’s no textbook for this kind of design (and things change so fast, it wouldn’t make sense to write one). Instead, we need a field guide. A living record of our learnings, tips, tricks, fears, dreams, curiosities, and hot takes.”

The first article — The Rise of the Model Designer — interviews Barron Webster, AI Model Designer at Figma. If you’re curious what that role even means, read on.

Nikita Prokopov published a fantastic, well-researched essay about the state of menu icons in macOS Tahoe: ​“In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that. But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn’t mean users will find what they are looking for faster. And even if the premise was solid, I still wish I could say: they did the best they could, given the goal. But that’s not true either: they did a poor job consistently applying the metaphors and designing the icons themselves.”

I’m not into the ​“best of” collections, but Helena Zhang made some truly special and thoughtful picks. Love seeing the new icons for my local Philadelphia Art Museum made it into the list!

Dylan Field argues that AI will generate more of the short‑lived, simple artifacts in software and design, while humans will remain central for long‑lasting, high‑impact work where craft and intention matter most.

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.