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.”

Tailwind’s Dan Hollick shows Ridd from Dive Club how Claude Code ties into Figma’s MCP server to spin up an editable UI, sharing his prompting tactics and live-debug workflow along the way. Handy if you’re testing AI-assisted builds from real design files.

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.

I wrote about Vijay Verma’s Kigen plugin in the past, but now he has extended it with a color generator for the web. It supports different color generation algorithms, naming patterns, and exports CSS, JSON, or Tailwind tokens.

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.

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.

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.