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.

Tailwind CSS joins Paper as investors and partners to ​“do whatever we can to help make Paper the absolute best design tool in the world for modern web teams.” Lately, Tailwind CSS has gotten strong tailwinds from AI codegen tools, as this standardized and encapsulated approach to styling works great both for humans and LLMs. Excited to see what a deeper integration with the design tool might look like.

Figma rebuilt its renderer on WebGPU, detailing the engineering work in this article: compute-shader opportunities, clearer error handling, and lower CPU overhead (with plans for RenderBundles/​MSAA), plus how the team rolled it out safely with device blocklists and mid-session fallback.

Figma announced early access to the limited alpha of editing designs using text prompts on the canvas. I’m stoked about this release as it will make experimenting, trying new ideas, and exploring alternatives so much faster.

The new design tool Paper entered public alpha and is now open for signups: ​“We are launching with features like image generation, shaders, real flex layout, Copy as React, OKLCH color picker, vectorize, and many more.”

Stephen Haney, founder of Paper, thought it’d be fun to let everyone try the Apple heat map invite effect on their logos and shared a public playground file. Mind-blowing that a complicated animation like this made with shaders could just be copied from the design app straight to React.

“For years, the boundaries between product development roles have become less defined. Our latest report quantifies this shift and explores what it means for you and your team.”

The Shape Builder is a newer vector tool added to Figma Design from Draw. First, Miggi shows how to use it to easily cut up a shape with a path. Next, he makes a yin-yang symbol with it in just a few seconds.

Emil Kowalski helps decide when and how to animate to provide a better user experience, starting with ensuring your animations have a purpose. I finished Emil’s course Animations on the Web this summer and highly recommend following his writing on motion and animation.

Design Manager Jonas Downey shares tips he learned for building resilient design teams at Figma, Twitter, and 37signals: start with team health, encourage experimentation and shifting roles, treat craft as a differentiator, build bridges across the org, be judicious about process, scale with intention, and make time for levity. ​”Adaptability doesn’t happen by accident—it’s a product of intentional leadership, express permission, and encouraging people to continually push the boundaries of what’s possible. And sometimes it takes a bit of trial and error to get right.”

I rarely wear clothes with prints, except for Figma’s swag. This article looks at a greater phenomenon of corporate attire: ​”Whether it’s a coveted Power Mac G4 Cube T‑shirt or a current Figma style, software is trending. One might call it ​“corpcore”: a sensibility that both revels in the iconic software logos of yore while celebrating the tech companies that touch a nerve today. People are increasingly repping apps on tote bags, hats, and water bottles in the same way they might wear a band T‑shirt or sports jersey.”

Dan Hollick is writing Making Software, ​“a reference manual for people who design and build software.“ I’ve always admired the depth he goes to while researching and explaining complex concepts. In this new chapter, he answers every question you’ve ever had about digital color.

Jakub built oklch.fyi and published a short intro to OkLCH: why perceptual uniformity makes palette-building easier, how to keep shades consistent, what to expect from gradients, practical notes on sRGB vs. Display-P3, and the state of browser support and CSS fallback. See Hacker News comments for an in-depth discussion.

James McDonald and Derek Briggs start a new design podcast together, and I can’t wait to subscribe. I enjoy the format where co-hosts explore topics at length over multiple episodes and listeners get to know them a little better, as was the case with my long-time favorites Design Details and Layout. ​“This podcast dives into design with a focus on learning taste, honing quality, and mastering the craft of great interfaces.”

Unicorn Studio makes creating WebGL effects, motion, and interactivity easy for designers. Later, they can be embedded in Framer, Webflow, or any website.

A fun chatbot made by Max Schoening from Notion. Reading The Grug Brained Developer first is recommended, but ​“What Grug know” is a good primer on simplicity and avoiding pain.

Maggie Appleton argues today’s chatbots drift toward sycophancy — undercutting Enlightenment habits of skeptical, reader-engaging discourse — and suggests giving users explicit ​“critique modes,” routing to tougher personas, and training methods beyond RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback) so assistants challenge us, not flatter us.