Cole Bemis demoed this experimental plugin for creating state machines and integrating them into your designs at the Figma × GitHub event last week. (Hope the video will be released later!) ​“Think of a state machine as a way to organize all the different ​‘states’ your design can be in. For example, a form might have states like ​‘empty,’ ​‘filled,’ ​‘submitting,’ or ​‘error.’ State machines help you clearly define these states and the rules for moving between them, making complex interactions more manageable.”

Bold moves from Shopify’s CEO Tobi Lutke, shared in an internal memo. On general AI usage: ​“Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. It’s a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance.”

On prototyping: ​“AI must be part of your GSD Prototype phase. The prototype phase of any GSD project should be dominated by AI exploration. Prototypes are meant for learning and creating information. AI dramatically accelerates this process. You can learn to produce something that other team mates can look at, use, and reason about in a fraction of the time it used to take.”

AI skills will be a part of the performance reviews and affect future hiring. Highly recommend reading an entire thing.

Karri Saarinen from Linear: ​“Prompting is essentially like writing a spec, sometimes it’s hard to articulate exactly what you want and ultimately control the outcome. Two people looking for the same thing might get wildly different results just based on how they asked for it, which creates an unprecedented level of dynamism within the product. This shift from deterministic traditional UI to something more unbridled raises a challenge for designers: with no predictable journeys to optimize, how do you create consistent, high-quality experiences?”

Karri Saarinen: ​“The idea that AI might ruin visual quality feels like a non-issue since there wasn’t much quality to ruin in the first place. […] My general view of AI is that it will just let us do more things, not take away things.”

Linear’s CEO shares his approach to quality at a time when ​“move fast and break things” no longer cuts it. My favorites: ​“Commit to quality at the leadership level”, ​“Do away with handoff”, ​“For quality, you need a team that views the spec as the baseline, not the finish line”, and ​“The simplest way to increase quality is to reduce scope”.

Euphrates Dahout, Senior UX Designer on Google’s Material Design team, on how harnessing user feedback made Material 3 the world’s most popular design kit: ​”As a UX Designer and the manager of the Material 3 Design Kit — a Figma library with 3.5 million users and counting — I’ve had to learn the hard way not to take negative feedback personally. Today, I’ve fully embraced comments. I believe that reading and considering this feedback is an essential part of making a valuable design resource. Whether positive or negative, user feedback helps me and the Material team get people what they need.”

Adobe brings multiplayer to Photoshop desktop and web apps. Now, multiple creators can simultaneously access and edit documents from different computers. It’s about time!

Yann-Edern Gillet reflects on his first year designing at Linear: ​“Experiencing imposter syndrome has taught me to accept feedback—both positive and constructive—with openness and to lean on my teammates for perspective and support. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s also a reminder that the work you’re doing matters. Over time, I’ve learned to reframe it as a driver for growth, reflection, and improvement, and that’s been one of the most rewarding parts of this journey.”

Yann-Edern Gillet from Linear shows how he organizes Figma files into a matrix consisting of Components, Inspirations, Playground, and Ready for Dev areas. Raphael Schaad originally recommended this approach in his Config talk From paper to pixels.

Atlassian explores how the partnership with Figma overcomes common challenges within the product development lifecycle by providing insights into this integrated toolset that empowers distributed teams to work seamlessly.

Linear launched a series of conversations with product leaders on how things of quality get built: ​“What is quality? It seems hard to describe and even harder to measure, but you can feel it when it’s there. You know it when you experience it.”

Apple updated their iOS 18 UI kit to include iPhone 16 Pro bezels (in all colors), updated templates to match new display dimensions, and several other bug fixes and improvements.

It was a great episode of the ​“In the File” series, where Luis Ouriach talks to the designer Yann-Edern Gillet and engineer Andreas Eldh from Linear about the recent update of their design system. I love their use of the LCH color space to generate a consistent palette and tight collaboration between design and engineering.

“Diana Mounter, Head of Design at GitHub, hosted a panel of Hubbers from research, engineering, and design, discussing everything from customer-first approaches to the integration of AI, and collaboration across GitHub teams.”

Sam Oshin, Senior Director of Brand and Marketing at GitHub, demonstrates how GitHub’s brand team uses Figma and a unique philosophy to building and maintaining brand systems.

The myriad of design annotation kits and countless types of accessibility training only works if designers want to use them. Learn how Alexis Lucio and Jan Maarten, Senior Accessibility Designers at GitHub, build new tools in Figma and host product design bootcamps to get designers involved and excited about accessibility.

A day before Config, teams from GitHub and Figma hosted a dev community event with lightning talks. The recordings are finally available.

In the first talk, Katie Langerman, Staff Systems Designer at GitHub, shares how designing, testing, and shipping new design tokens at scale without disrupting users requires meticulous planning and care. She discusses how the Primer design system team revamped Primer Primitives with a new naming convention and build process, connecting core Figma libraries with code.

“Spectrum, Adobe’s design system, already had a robust icon system, but the time had come for a redesign. Evolving a design system’s icons can involve updating and/​or redesigning assets, improving how icons are maintained and served to the teams using them, and creating a solution for adding, updating, and deprecating design elements within it. Months of discovery, exploration, reviews, and sharing laid the groundwork for the icon team’s three-phase process. It began with extensive design exploration and beta testing to confirm the needs of product teams, and ended with implementing suggestions for improving search, customization, and serving icons. It’s a method of inquiry, feedback, and refinement that other teams can apply to their work.”

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.

“How do Replit & Linear approach designer to developer collaboration? We’ll talk to two high-performing teams about streamlining design-to-code handoff for shipping better products. Learn insights on effective collaboration and ideal workflows with Figma’s Dev Mode, Linear, and Replit.”