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.

Figma turned 13 on August 13th! To celebrate, Rogie streamed the live process of drawing a birthday card with portraits of Dylan and Evan — what a long way from the early sketches!

Updates to AI-powered image editing features across all products — remove background or boost resolution for up to 25 images at once, and choose between Gemini 2.0 Flash and GPT Image 1 to get results that best match your prompt.

In this livestream, James McDonald iterates on Ridd’s design for Inflight and talks through design decisions in real time. Nice peek at how product polish actually happens.

Miggi and special guests walk through updates across Figma Make, Sites, Buzz, FigJam, Slides, Dev Mode, Draw, and Design. Highlights include style context and Supabase integration in Make, vector simplifying and offset in Draw, grid updates, Dev Mode’s interactive inspection, and Sites’ background video fill.

A behind-the-scenes look at how Figma’s product icons come together: Tim Van Damme shares guidelines (one pixel strokes, rounded caps, consistent and balanced sizes) and iterations it takes to make the whole suite feel like a family. Love the idea of rating confidence: ​“Tim frequently solicits feedback from product designers and product managers, guiding the conversation with a one-to-five star rating to show how confident he is in a design.”

Zeh Fernandes revisits David Krakauer’s ​“complementary vs. competitive” framework — think abacus vs. calculator, GPS as a skill-eroder — and argues that AI tools should teach as well as do. ​”Often, we don’t want to be better navigators, or our use of math is so trivial it doesn’t justify constant practice. And that’s fine. So long as it’s a deliberate choice. But in digital product design, the emphasis tends to fall on outcomes alone: getting the job done, removing friction, making everything feel effortless. In the short term, we gain speed. Over time, though, we risk dulling the very skills we once actively cultivated.”

Noah Levin, VP of Product Design at Figma, sits down with the Design Better podcast to answer their questions about hiring and scaling design teams in the AI age, fostering better design-developer collaboration, and lessons from designing the new Figma.

This effect looks incredible! So glad we won’t need to deal with hacky imitations. Don’t miss a breakdown of how Miggi made this video.

Figma’s newest product designer Rogie presents a new effect that allows you to manipulate light, depth, frost, and refraction to create dynamic elements that refract light like physical glass. This playground file will teach you how to use the effect and provide creative inspiration to have fun with glass. 

Jenny Wen, previously a Director of Design at Figma and now a design lead at Anthropic: ​“The way I’ve seen great work made isn’t using any sort of design process. It’s skipping steps when we deem them unnecessary. It’s doing them out of order just for the heck of it. It’s backtracking when we’re unsatisfied. It’s changing things after we’ve handed off the design. It’s starting from the solution first. It’s operating on vibes and intuition. It’s making something just for the sake of making people smile. It’s a feeling that we nailed it. It’s knowing how to bend the process in your favor. It’s the sense to know how to keep making your work better. And it’s a clear, unwavering ideal of what good looks like.”

Ridd recorded an entire new video influenced by her article.

Grid improvements, offering more precision and control: delete rows and columns, set min and max, and adjust multiple grids with a faster grid picker. The Grid Playground community file was also updated with new features.

Brett from DesignJoy breaks down the process of creating animated mockups using Midjourney and Figma.