Figma added iPhone Duo and iPhone 18 to every place you pick a mobile frame, from the properties panel to prototype settings, Make previews, and code layers.

Gemini 4 Argon, Google’s latest model, is now in the Figma Make model picker on all plans.

After years without a design chief over both hardware and software, Apple isn’t hiring one. Mark Gurman reports that John Ternus has taken the role himself, working in the studio several times a week. ​“Steve Jobs, of course, was known for taking a similarly direct approach to design while working with Ive. But Ternus’ involvement marks a major shift from the Cook era. Designers say Cook typically visited the studio for about an hour once a month, at most.”

“Benchmark and read the transcripts” – the most useful lesson in Atlassian’s write-up on building a CLI for its design system. The dashboards told them whether the agent succeeded. The transcripts showed agents ignoring carefully written instructions and reading source files instead. Charlie Sutton, Atlassian’s Chief Design Officer, adds that the public ADS MCP and CLI together cover 90%+ of atlassian.design.

Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger are taking the Tailwind Labs to Shopify. Tailwind CSS stays MIT-licensed and the same people keep leading it, but the business around it ends – both Tailwind Plus and ui​.sh are closed to new signups.

The framework is installed over 110 million times a week, but in January Adam had to lay off three of his four engineers with revenue down close to 80%. As AI agents read the docs developers no longer do, and the docs were selling the templates that funded the framework. Building a business around the open-source framework is incredibly hard, so I’m glad Shopify is ready to foot the bill.

The detail I keep thinking about: ​“We found buttons are tough to tap when they land right in the fold.” So Apple built fold avoidance into sheets, alerts, menus, and toolbar buttons, all of which nudge themselves aside whenever iPhone Duo is partially folded, while scrollable content stays where it is. Adopt the system components and you get the behavior for free.

“I worry a little bit about function following form.” That’s Katarina Batina, VP of Design at Shopify, in the middle of a piece about how completely her team reorganized around AI tooling. Roughly 60% of Shopify’s designers now push code directly to production, up 38% since last September, with over 5,500 live prototype sites built on Quick, the internal hosting platform. Her caveat is the part worth keeping: ​“There’s so much discourse around what tools are in fashion this week versus next week. The problem is we risk losing connection with the questions we’re trying to answer and the people we are building software for.”

Apple updated their official Figma kit for iOS and iPadOS 27, with a full overhaul for Liquid Glass, expanded component states, and naming changes that now align with code. Because it comes directly from Apple, it reflects current system behavior rather than a third-party approximation — which matters when you’re designing anything that needs to read as genuinely native.

Apple acqui-hired the team behind Play, the SwiftUI prototyping tool that won a 2025 Apple Design Award, with the app already gone from the App Store since April. The speculation — and the implication of @avstorm’s post — is that Play’s real-time Mac-to-iPhone prototyping workflow is heading into Xcode as a native Design Mode. If that happens, it would be a direct answer to what Play was doing that Figma can’t: designing iOS interfaces in the actual framework they’ll ship in.

Linda Dong and Doug Williams, design evangelists at Apple, walk through the eight principles Apple now uses as its design foundation. The framing that stood out is their definition of design as ​“making something with intention” and the reminder that every feature asks for someone’s time, attention, and trust. This is the video companion to the refreshed HIG Design Principles page, and the first time in a while Apple has put this much weight behind articulating its design philosophy publicly.

Figma’s official announcement that the Dev Mode MCP Server now plugs into Xcode, alongside Cursor, VS Code, and Claude Code. The practical win, as one designer put it in the replies, is that design tokens stop getting copy-pasted into Swift and component states stop being decoded over Slack — the Figma file becomes the thing Xcode actually reads from.

The refreshed HIG Design Principles, posted alongside the WWDC26 talk. Eight tenets — Purpose, Agency, Responsibility, Familiarity, Flexibility, Simplicity, Craft, Delight — each opening with a plain-language imperative (“Be clear and direct,” ​“Care about every detail,” ​“Make it human”) and expanding into sub-principles.

Karri Saarinen, CEO of Linear, writes one of the more grounded takes on AI’s current state. Linear’s cloud agent now fixes more than 1,000 issues per month, but Karri is clear that hard problems remain hard and design tools are still challenging to use. On having a design tool operate directly on the production codebase: ​“A lot of the design work I do is not production design. I am not trying to implement the final version or test every edge case. Most design work is about making decisions, understanding the problem, and finding the fit. That process generates many variations and messy ideas.”

The expertise paradox section is the most useful: ​“AI often feels most impressive in domains where you know the least.” Expertise makes AI harder to use but also more valuable, because experts know how to steer, constrain, and evaluate the output.

GitHub Copilot can now connect to the Figma MCP server to push rendered UI into Figma as editable frames and pull design context back into code.

An hour-long firsthand account from a Shopify designer on integrating Claude Code into his day-to-day workflow. Product design at that scale means navigating design systems, production codebases, and cross-functional handoffs, which is a more realistic stress test for agentic coding tools than a clean demo. The shift from ​“designer who writes prompts” to ​“designer who ships code” is happening faster than most predicted.

Google’s Gemini team walks through how they use gradients, circles, and motion as a cohesive illustration system to make an unpredictable AI assistant feel legible, calm, and trustworthy. It’s interesting for anyone designing ​“thinking states” or multimodal assistants, because it shows specific visual strategies — directional gradients as energy flow, morphing shapes for cognition, motion tied to user gestures — instead of yet another generic ​“AI glow.”

“When a system is hard to approach, the design must be soft. This softness — conveyed through guided, pulsing gradient shapes, clear language, and transparent signaling — allows users to engage with the new system feeling secure and supported. The gradient can be many things through its animations: aspirational and uplifting, directional and instructional. But they remain soft and direct, and always looking forward; they’re deeply connected to the Google brand with room to grow, like the personified gradient, rippling and responding to voice.”

“Starting today, the Figma for Jira app supports webhooks, so teams can get instant design status updates like ​“Ready for Dev” directly in Jira tickets, with no admin setup required. Webhook support is enabled for newly linked design files, and we’re rolling it out to existing links soon.”

Nikita Prokopov published a fantastic, well-researched essay about the state of menu icons in macOS Tahoe: ​“In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that. But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn’t mean users will find what they are looking for faster. And even if the premise was solid, I still wish I could say: they did the best they could, given the goal. But that’s not true either: they did a poor job consistently applying the metaphors and designing the icons themselves.”

Kaari wraps it up: ​”I believe design comes in many flavors. It’s influenced by the person, the domain, the market, the customers. In consumer products, you might need to test ideas quickly because motivations are hard to predict. In B2B or enterprise, you often have more context and can design from that. Some industries require extreme reliability and clarity. The environment matters too. Stakeholders, clients, company culture, and your skills as a designer. If you’re more visual, you lead with visuals. If you’re strong in code, you might use it earlier. […] I want to elevate this discussion above tools, and make sure tools don’t take over the future of design. I don’t want us to needlessly devalue conceptual and divergent thinking just because new tools make execution easier.”

“Our industry is not very patient, and once you start building designs directly to production as the default, the culture and organizational reasons to consider problems, concepts, and intentions start evaporating. We start devaluing the why behind our designs in favor of output.
My worry isn’t the code or the tools themselves. It’s a decline in consideration, and with that, a decline in unique, well-designed products. The question is how we keep that alive even as new tools and technologies emerge.”

Kaari replies: ​“The ​“make your own things” from generic blocks idea is warm one, and I do appreciate it. Where it starts to lose me is when it tries to force a reality that doesn’t really exist, and it’s not what people do or look for. Look at any craft. The kitchen. The workshop. Purpose-built spaces filled with purpose-built tools, often shaped by centuries of tradition (also sometimes known as experience). Serious craftspeople don’t operate in primitives. A chef doesn’t stock ​“a knife”, ​“a pot”, ​“a carrot”. They have a specific knife, a specific size, a tradition they trust.”