Whoa! Epic collab between Soleio and Indie​.vc. Six interviews with design pioneers and true first-of-kind designers — Henry Modisett, Colin Dunn, Jessica Hische, Julie Zhuo, Nicholas Jitkoff, and Susan Kare. Now I just need to set aside 7 hours to watch them all ASAP.

Lenny Rachitsky’s survey was all over Design Twitter this week. Next are a few interesting takeaways. 1) ​“Workers at smaller companies report significantly lower burnout levels than those at larger companies.” 2) Designers are the most burnt-out tech workers, closely followed only by Research and Growth — I wonder if it’s because these roles constantly deal with ambiguity and limited autonomy. 3) Optimism about career and current role is on the decline, with designers having the largest negative sentiment change. 4) ​“Fewer than 1 in 3 tech workers (26.6%) rate their managers as highly effective, while more than 4 in 10 (42.3%) rate their managers as ineffective. […] People in product and design roles have the most negative leadership perceptions.” 5) Startup founders are the happiest people in tech.

My friend Christine Vallaure shares a few lessons learned building her educational platform as a company of one. Christine’s approach to running a business is truly inspiring, and she masterfully told her story at this year’s Config and in her new book Solo. (Which I genuinely recommend and she offers a coupon to my readers in the Friendly Promo above, which is not an ad.)

(Read without a paywall.) The Verge interviews Dylan Field about ​“how he sees AI fitting into Figma after a rough start to integrating the technology last year, the new areas he’s targeting to grow the platform, and more.”

Meng To first wrote a comprehensive guide on UI prompting, and now recorded this 44-minute tutorial as well.

“The State of AI in Design report, created by Foundation Capital and Designer Fund, is based on a survey of 400+ designers and conversations with leaders at Stripe, Notion, Anthropic, and more. It explores the real impact of AI on design today, in 2025.”

The new Edit Image feature allows changing an image using prompts, powered by gpt-image‑1. The Make an Image feature got an AI model picker so users can choose between gpt-image‑1, Gemini Imagen 3, or Titan V2. Additionally, the AI beta was rolled out to all Professional, Organization, and Enterprise plans. If you’re not seeing AI features, check that your Admin has your AI access toggle turned on.

If you’re curious about the new gpt-image‑1 model, check out this announcement from OpenAI: ​“Today, we’re bringing the natively multimodal model that powers this experience in ChatGPT to the API via gpt-image‑1, enabling developers and businesses to easily integrate high-quality, professional-grade image generation directly into their own tools and platforms. The model’s versatility allows it to create images across diverse styles, faithfully follow custom guidelines, leverage world knowledge, and accurately render text—unlocking countless practical applications across multiple domains.”

The new curved connectors mode for right-brained people. I’ll stick to my neatly organized ​“elbowed” connectors.

I had a hard time planning my Config agenda across 7 tracks and 5 stages, so I made this visual agenda planner in FigJam. It lays out all sessions by day, track, and stage so you can easily spot any conflicts. Copy it from the Community to plan your day individually or as a group. Here are the talks I plan to attend.

Community events are smaller gatherings and meetups happening around Config. In my opinion, they’re the best way to meet new people as the groups are much smaller, the vibes are more relaxed, and the topics are more focused. I plan to attend a few events below.

My friend Molly Hellmuth Tsacudakis is bringing back her morning hike and coffee on Tuesday, May 6th from 7:30 to 11 AM. I’ll be arriving the night before and might need a caffeine drip along the way, but very excited about this event. ​“Make new connections while stretching your legs, soaking in the gorgeous bay views, and sipping on espresso. UI Prep’s Molly Hellmuth will guide you along a coastal trail with views of the Golden Gate Bridge. Afterward, we’ll enjoy some well-deserved coffee on the beach courtesy of UI Prep.”

The recording of the latest Release Notes livestream is finally available. While these updates have already been covered in the last two issues, I always enjoy watching hands-on demos and explainers. In this episode, Luis Ouriach and Alexia Danton share all the latest goodies like FigPals (RIP), design handoff releases, accessibility contrast info, annotations in design mode, collapsing layers, reordering modes and collections, and more.

Three primary updates: hide and show variable fills, duplicate and copy styles, and the go-to-main component shortcut (Control+Option+Command+K). See the complete list of quality-of-life updates in the release notes. 

“Connected Projects makes it easy for freelancers and agencies on different Figma plans to collaborate seamlessly with clients. Work together to co-edit designs, and share resources like libraries — all while staying on your own Figma seat.”

Freshly baked goodies: FigPals for April Fun Week (extended until April 11); a button for collapsing layers — love that it excludes the layer tree of your selection; quality-of-life improvements to corner radius inputs and flyouts for effects, fills, and layout grids; reordering variables modes and collections; annotations in Design Mode; accessibility contrast in color picker; and finally, an eyedropper added to Dev Mode.

This one is a big ​“finally” for me! BRB, I have some library cleanup to do.

Annotations are now available in Design Mode with new color-coded categories. Love that categories are fully editable, so you can adjust them to your team’s workflow.

See if color contrast meets accessibility standards right within the color picker. I’m glad this is now built-in and the UI looks great (see an X thread from Billy Sweeney), but as a color nerd and creator of Accessible Palette, I wish Figma went a step further and supported APCA. I wrote about issues with the WCAG 2 back in 2021 (see the last section), and Arthur Objartel made a strong case for supporting it as well.

A few tweaks and improvements to the file browser create a more consistent experience.

“Figma is localizing for the Spanish market. This includes full product translation, culturally adapted user interfaces, and dedicated support for Spanish language users. Figma plans to expand product localization to additional languages throughout the year, as it continues to invest in its global community.” (Coincidently, I was in Spain when this was announced. Rest assured I didn’t touch Figma while vacationing with my family.)

Last Tuesday, Figma rolled out the new pricing, which was announced in December. The design seats price increased, while Dev Mode seats remained unchanged and all paid seats now include FigJam and Slides. Admins got upfront approval over seat upgrades.

“Figma now transforms common character combinations into smart symbols in all fonts. Now when you type the following characters – ©, ®, ™, ->, <-, vv, ^^, \[ \] – Figma will automatically transform them into smart symbols: ©️, ®️, ™️, →, ← , ↓, ↑, ▢. This will occur with every font, as long as you have the ​“Use smart quotes/​symbols” preference on. Also available in FigJam and Slides.”

Dann Petty has been one of the most vocal Figma critics lately. (See his previous post for some context, or go all the way back to moving drafts drama in the summer.) I don’t think corporations need help defending themselves, but in this case, I see the situation from a different angle and want to share some thoughts.

First, I built my first Framer website recently and thought it was a compelling alternative for designing websites. It often takes me longer to prototype a throw-away interaction in Figma than to do it straight in code (especially with AI!), so designing and animating the actual website instead of a mockup felt refreshing. I missed some of the more advanced features (no variables, really?), but I’m sure they are on the roadmap. In the end, it wasn’t the right tool for this project, but I agree with Dann that similar tools will be ​“owning the web design market”. That said, they have nothing to offer product designers.

Here is the part I disagree with: “(People are) mad at Figma because they lost focus on designers and got over bloated with useless features no one wanted or needed and started to focus on developers and their Config event.” Dann doesn’t specify which features he considers useless, but I assume it’s those related to larger design systems and developer handoff. Personally, I rarely feel restricted while working on visual design, but often hit the wall with a lack of CSS grids, inability to replicate the props.children behavior in components, still incomplete variables support, barebones design system analytics, Dev Mode, prototyping, etc. On my product team engineers outnumber designers 5 to 1, so a lot of our time and attention is spent on cross-team alignment. These features might be useless to freelancers and agencies, but worth their weight in gold to product teams.

Lastly, a note on Figma becoming ​“incredibly expensive.” First, they kept the same $15/​m price of the Professional plan since 2018. According to the CPI Inflation Calculator, $15 in 2018 had the same buying power as $19.31 today — pretty close to $20. Second, at least in the US, $20/​m or $192/​year is not much for a pro tool — some of my streaming and newspaper subscriptions cost more. Third, it now includes two more products! My team just upgraded our Figma account to the Organization plan and it was cheaper to wait for the new pricing as we no longer needed separate licenses for FigJam and Slides. This will not be true for everyone, but not all seats increased in price while getting some perks.