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.

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.”