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.

Figma’s Form S‑1 submitted to the SEC in April is now available to the public. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined.

Lots of fascinating details that were not shared publicly before. Figma’s last 12 months (LTM) revenue is $821M, so most likely they will cross $1B in revenue in 2025. Maintaining 46% YoY revenue growth at this scale is nuts. 76% of customers use 2 or more products, and ²⁄₃ of users are non-designers — Figma is no longer just a design tool. The entire form is hundreds of pages long, so it will take a while to read in full.

Theo explains why Figma is going public, why now, and what risks they’re facing.

On July 9th, Friends of Figma chapters around the world organize a 24-hour virtual event featuring insights and experiences from makers, thinkers, and builders. Each participating Friends of Figma chapter hosts a one-hour session featuring local speakers and stories — creating a continuous, community-led experience that spans time zones and continents. The event is free and will be recorded; check out the massive agenda in multiple languages!

Ridd shares his new approach for vibe coding a side project. He treats ChatGPT as a CTO and Cursor as an engineer, with the CTO keeping all context about the project and breaking it down into chunks for an engineer to implement. I’ve been using a similar approach for a recent project with lots of moving parts and unknowns and it’s been working well. My only tip is to pick a smarter CTO in the form of an o3 model, maybe even employing Deep Research for the original plan.

“New in Dev Mode MCP Server: Annotations are included as design context. Generated code now benefits from both the structure of your design and your design intent.”

Kris Rasmussen, CTO of Figma: ​“When we announced Figma Sites at Config, we shared that we’ll be rolling out a CMS for it in the months ahead. Figma CMS will make life easier for marketers and designers who need to update website content, and Payload brings all the stuff developers love—a powerful, customizable backend for building scalable websites and apps, plus an intuitive admin panel for editors. By teaming up with Payload, we’re creating something special.”

This is huge! A few months ago, I wanted to use Framer for a marketing website but ended up recommending building a custom website only because its CMS was so lacking. When Figma announced that Figma Sites CMS is ​“coming soon”, I expected something just as barebones in the beginning. Getting a proper CMS in addition to code layers and Figma Make components makes Sites insanely customizable and powerful.

Figma acquired Payload, an open-source Next.js CMS. James Mikrut, founder of Payload: ​“Figma and Payload together can and will solve a problem that’s been bugging me (and probably all of you) for years. The gap between design and code still exists. Designers create in Figma, then devs recreate in code, then content teams struggle to maintain it all. It’s inefficient and frustrating. And historically, the CMS tends to make it worse. With Figma, we can (and will) solve these problems in new ways without compromising.”

James Mikrut, founder of Payload, also joined one of my favorite podcasts, Syntax, to chat with Wes Box about being acquired by Figma. They discuss building an open-source business, the future of UI design, AI interfaces, and what this means for the future of Payload and Figma.

Ruxandra Duru works with Google designers focusing on the intersection of color, emotion, and UX design. ​“After years of what we could call a color fixation, I’ve developed a three-step approach to color theory. My secret to making color more pleasurable and intentional — and much less scary — has to do with balancing, relating, and completing your colors.”

Elie Majorel shares the playbook of prototyping with AI tools, allowing other designers to spend less time on appearance and more time on impact. ​“One Sunday I opened Miro, sketched a few boxes for a new agent search, and copied the flow into Claude. Claude wrote a clear spec. I pasted that prompt into Lovable, pressed generate, and two hours later a working React repo ran in a sandbox. Engineers forked the code the week after. Leaders clicked the demo and said keep going. Two hours from idea to running product. No Figma layers. No endless handoff.”

Romina recorded a quick walkthrough on how to build clickable prototypes using Figma MCP and Cursor.

Apple’s SF Pro and SF Compact fonts are now automatically downloaded in Figma Editor, Slides, and Buzz.

Sebastiaan de With is the co-founder and designer of the award-winning apps Halide and Kino for photography and video. In this article, he imagines what could be next for the UI design at Apple: ​“What would I do if I were Apple’s design team? What changes would I like to see, and what do I think is likely? Considering where technology is going, how do I think interface design should change to accommodate?”

(Reminder that WWDC25 is happening this week, with a keynote on Monday at 10 AM PT. That’s when we’ll find out how close his predictions are to what Apple designers have in mind.)

Speaking of Apple, the latest winners of the Design Award were announced. Congrats to Play for winning the Innovation award!

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.)