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.

Matt recorded his first reaction walkthrough of the new UI3 and Make Designs AI features. Regarding UI3, I’d also love an option to hide a floating toolbar and ​“Ready for dev” actions. (There are no developers in my personal workspace, and even at work we have Figma projects with only marketing assets that would never require development.)

A very timely episode of Dive, where Ridd interviews Jordan Singer live at Config about his journey from the Diagram acquisition to Figma’s 2024 AI release. In the middle, they discuss how Figma’s generative features work and why they needed to create a UI kit. (A funny inception moment — at 45:22, I’m coming into view to take this picture.)

The next day, Dylan Field posted a thread stating that ​“the accusations around data training in this tweet are false” and reiterating that Make Designs ​“uses off-the-shelf LLMs, combined with design systems we commissioned to be used by these models.”

The Make Designs feature was disabled until the team completes a full QA pass on the underlying design system.

Ridd shows his advanced Raycast setup. One thing I adopted immediately is the Figma File Search extension he recommended — what a wonderful time-saver! The Color Picker and Ruler extensions might replace some of the third-party tools I’ve been relying on as well. 

Femke made a template for the presentation deck as an overview of your next design project.

Mihika shares the inspiration and the process of making one of the coolest Slides features.

I shared Lenny’s interview with Mihika a couple of months ago, but it’s worth recommending again now that it’s clear that this ​“0 to 1” product she talked about was Figma Slides.

Mihika Kapoor shares the story of taking Flides from the Maker Week pitch to reality. That team photo in the end is a poor gold. Also, see Keeyen’s demo tutorial from a year ago with an early prototype, where he pretends to be Zander Supafast.

“You’ll now find Figma Slides templates featured on our homepage, a new much-improved navigation, and simpler category pages.” Oh, and there is also a new homepage!