Ana Boyer on creating a component API — a process of defining how you will approach constructing and naming your components across all of your libraries and documentation that will be consumed by your design and engineering teams.

The Yo! Podcast by Rob Hope is one of my favorite shows. In this wrap-up of Season 3, Rob talks to Pablo Stanley: ​“Pablo Stanley is a designer, artist, and musician based in Mexico. We discuss the creative side of his childhood gang, the importance of having fun with your team, why he left the Roboto NFT community, monetizing his AI stock site, and the importance of details in all aspects of design.”

On September 20th, the Portugal chapter of Friends of Figma organizes a free full-day hybrid conference for the community by the community. ​“Expect talks and workshops on the Future of Design, DesignOPS, Design Systems, Creativity and, as always, a lot of amazing Figma tips as tricks.” All talks will be streamed, but I wish I could attend the in-person event in Lisbon!

Speaking of design conferences, the GitHub Design team recently held its second internal design conference, LGTM. You can watch talks from last year in the YouTube playlist, but a couple of this year’s talks have already been published as well — ​“Who is the We in the How Might We” on building trust and ​“Async/​Await” on close collaboration across non-overlapping time zones.

“SVG Pattern Builder allows you to create, customize, and download unique animated SVG patterns for your web and design projects. Great for Figma, Framer, Webflow and video projects.” Made by Meng To from Design Code with a lot of help from Claude AI.

A behind-the-scenes look into the journey of launching Figma Slides. As Mihika noted, this talk could be considered the other half of her podcast with Lenny on building zero-to-one products from a few months ago.

Miggi applies the new ​“Remove background” AI feature, a vector mask outlining the shape, a hidden ​“Show mask outlines” command (that I didn’t know about!), and a simple prototype to create a popping out head avatar.

A 7‑minute tutorial from Miggi on using the new Suggest Auto Layout and the AI features ​“Rewrite this,” ​“Replace content,” and ​“Rename layers.” 

Luis on the power of efficient aliasing when building typographic styles from primitives.

Minimize or hide the new UI to regain more screen real estate as you work.

A quick tip from Miggi on using grids to generate type scale and place graphics.

Ana Boyer helps design system teams ensure designers get library updates not by copying main components into their working files.

A retrospective on an issue with Make Designs from Noah Levin, a VP of Design at Figma. First, a reminder on how the feature works: “[…] Make Designs feature employs three parts: a model, some context, and a prompt. This feature currently uses a collection of off-the-shelf models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Amazon’s Titan model—the same generally available models that anyone can use—and we have not done any additional training or fine-tuning. To give the model enough freedom to compose designs from a wide variety of domains, we commissioned two extensive design systems (one for mobile and one for desktop) with hundreds of components, as well as examples of different ways these components can be assembled to guide the output.”

What went wrong: ​“We carefully reviewed the underlying design systems throughout the course of development and during a private beta. But in the week leading up to Config, new components and example screens were added that we simply didn’t vet carefully enough. A few of those assets were similar to aspects of real world applications, and appeared in the output of the feature with certain prompts.”

Building a Figma plugin with a server side and API calls in 2 hours using Claude AI.

Rogie King has another example of roughening up icons for wireframes.

Luis brings up an interesting point about optical spacing and bounding boxes of icons. That’s been bugging me as well, but I don’t think there is a universal solution besides creating two sets of icons for vertical and horizontal alignment, which feels like an overkill for most systems.

Design Systems WTF podcast from zeroheight: ​“AI tools are transforming the landscape, making it easier than ever to create and design. Is this making everyone a designer? Will design system makers have to herd even more cats? We’ll be joined by special guest Pablo Stanley, the brilliant co-founder of two AI-based design tools, Musho and Lummi. We’ll unpack the potential of AI-based design tools and some risks. Join us for a lively conversation filled with spicy takes about how AI is reshaping the boundaries of design.”

In this episode of Dive recorded at Config, Ridd talks to Figma design engineer Vincent van der Meulen about how the new Visual Search feature was born from a mid-project pivot. Don’t miss Vincent’s original pitch video for visual search in Figma.

Jordan Singer shared the original pitch deck and a video recording for Diagram (acquired by Figma last year).

Vijay Verma shows how ​“Figma Slides” illustrations were made.

Miggi reminds us that property labels in Figma UI can now be turned on or off.