Use Stable Diffusion to create unique AI images for your designs without ever leaving Figma with this text-to-image plugin. Won the ​“3rd Product of the Day” at ProductHunt on August 1st.

John Maeda shares takeaways from his Design in Tech Report, thoughts on designing with artificial intelligence, and why we should embrace uphill thinking in a world optimized for shortcuts. See also the livestream ​“Diving deeper: Designing with AI in the future”.

The first-ever demo of a new plugin by Diagram. Can’t wait for it to become a part of the editor!

The first segment of the opening talk of the second day, with Noah Levin and Diagram team discussing how AI will shape our future and work. Continue by watching Generative AI and Creative Arms Race by Ovetta Patrice Sampson from Google, AI and empowering creative careers by Scott Belsky and Brooke Hopper from Adobe, and wrap up with The crescendo of AI in our collective future by Kanjun Qiu and Reid Hoffman.

Noah Levin, VP of Design, unveils Figma’s vision for AI and shares that Figma has acquired Diagram. (It’s fun to look back at all Jordan’s experiments I shared in this newsletter, starting from 2020.) ​“In short, AI can help us do more — across every part of the product development process — faster. It’s not a feature, but a core capability; more than a product, it’s a platform that can up-level our work to the plane of problem solving — arguably the core pursuit of our craft, and the reason many of us got into design and product building in the first place.”

“Hippo is a plugin to create stunning vector illustrations and web assets right in Figma, thanks to AI. It’s made to be easy to use, with 22 handpicked styles tailored for the web – no prompt engineering required. It can also vectorize or edit any image with AI.”

This new AI assistant for Figma that helps you write effective UX copy just won the Product of the Day on Product Hunt last week. It’s focused specifically on UX writing best practices and provides copy suggestions inspired by world-class products in your industry, tailored to your target users, and product voice and tone.

Amelia Wattenberger wrote an insightful essay discussing a few reasons chatbots are not the future of interfaces and how adding controls, information, and affordances can make them more usable.

Tutorial Tim shows how to use the AI plugin Wireframe Designer.

Silvia Bormüller interviews Chris Lüders about his upcoming ​“The Power of AI in Design Systems” workshop, where they discuss how AI can help with the design systems documentation, how tokens help in daily work, and the steps and prompts for generating design tokens for Tokens Studio with ChatGPT.

Punit Chawla showcases a few new AI plugins — Figaro, FontExploreAI, Aidentic, Cube GPT, QoQo​.AI, AI Designer, AI Color Palette Generator, and Diagram. While many of them still feel like proof of concept rather than a daily tool, it’s really interesting to see the direction design tools are taking.

A proof of concept that generates wireframe designs using the GPT 3.5 model. See this thread by Wu Chenmu on how it works.

Effortlessly remove backgrounds or isolate objects using AI.

The new plugin by Meng To uses AI to upscale up to 8X the original resolution. Perfect for a variety of images including avatars, background images, Midjourney renders, and marketing images. (Interesting that the author heavily relied on ChatGPT 4 to build it.)

I love seeing how teams improve their workflows with internal Figma plugins. Here, Bryan Berger from Discord built a handy plugin to randomize avatar fills from their design system library. The source code is available on GitHub. (I guess something is in the air, as Miguel Solorio is building something similar for his specific use case.)

I mentioned the FigGPT plugin in the last issue, and now Edward Chechique wrote a detailed walkthrough of using this plugin. It requires an OpenAI API key but then provides direct access to ChatGPT prompts and tools for UX writing directly from the Figma document.

“FigGPT is a tiny plugin that connects ChatGPT to Figma and helps you to compose and edit copy.”

Discord designer Daniel Destefanis built an internal plugin for generating entire conversations using ChatGTP and rendering them using their design system. This is an excellent example of automating a mundane part of day-to-day work with AI.

Cool open-source proof-of-concept, related to the above post by Edward. For now, I’m skeptical of AI-generated components (explaining ideas and details may take longer than building from scratch), but bullish on offloading mundane tasks, error detection, and quality checks to the AI.

Edward Chechique shares some ideas for AI features that he hopes to see at Config 2023.