Designer Advocate Lauren breaks down how to create code layers in Figma Sites.
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.
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!
Developer Advocate Jake Albaugh shows how to bring design context from Figma directly to your agentic coding tools with the new Dev Mode MCP server.
Beautiful work by Tim Van Damme. See a sneak peek of a few more on their way.
Great demo of code layers by Niko, who is now a product manager for interactivity. “Code now belongs; make a mess, rev, refine.”
Dylan Field is interviewed by Guy Raz, a host of the How I Built This podcast, “where innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists take us through the often challenging journeys they took to build their now iconic companies.” See a few highlights from this conversation in the blog post 7 moments that shaped Figma, as told by Dylan Field.
Joey Banks recreated Apple’s new iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 button styles using Figma, complete with their new Liquid Glass material. These buttons are fully editable and use native Figma effects.
A new practical plugin from Luis comes in handy while rebuilding shadows in Figma from an existing website.
I always learn something new from Molly — today it’s grade support in fonts. Read more in the Grade axis (GRAD) article at Google Fonts.
Evil Martians open-sourced their Martian Grotesk font, which I’ve been using at Figmalion for almost 3 years. I highly recommend trying it out and reading about the design philosophy of this project — Roman Shamin put so many innovative ideas into its design, making it an excellent choice for UI design.
Molly shows how to simplify a common list design element by using the new Grids instead of nesting vertical Auto Layout stacks inside horizontal rows.
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.)
A new plugin from Vijay Verma for setting up the foundation of your design system in just a few clicks. The core variables and styles for the color palette, typography, and spacing are all created from a few customizable presets.
First, that illustration from Miggi is very cute. Second, I have no idea how these talented minds at the Figma Draw team made all of these complex visual effects exportable to SVG. Mad respect!
Miggi shows how to be more experimental and expressive with Figma Draw features like progressive layer blurs, texture, and a custom brush. Learn to pair these with Smart Animate prototyping, and you can come up with some novel effects.
Luis explores what Notion’s design system could look like and how he would approach building it from scratch, including naming conventions and an opinion on the component structure.
As Christine Vallaure writes, “if you want to master Figma’s new Grid, you need to know how CSS Grid works.” In this in-depth guide, she explains how both of them work and shows where Figma ends and the browser takes over to do the heavy lifting, so you don’t miss out on the flexibility, responsiveness, and layout power that only the browser can fully deliver.
Meng To first wrote a comprehensive guide on UI prompting, and now recorded this 44-minute tutorial as well.
(Read without a paywall.) The Verge interviews Dylan Field about “how he sees AI fitting into Figma after a rough start to integrating the technology last year, the new areas he’s targeting to grow the platform, and more.”