Who would have thought a decade ago that this might happen? ​“Today we are releasing Photoshop on the web as part of all Photoshop plans, complete with newly released Adobe Firefly generative AI features including Generative Fill and Generative Expand.”

Raquel Piqueras and Christina Yang from Microsoft on organizing Figma files and making a few intentional changes which resulted in fewer meetings, higher quality work, a more agile environment, and a few praises from their partners along the way. (Thanks for sharing the friend’s link!)

The brand new kit with the evolution of Microsoft’s design system. Supports variables, theme switching, and uses memory more efficiently.

“Design Manager Juli Sombat sheds light on how a need for more cohesion led Spotify’s design systems team to take a cross-platform approach to components.”

“Adobe Inc.’s $20 billion takeover of Figma Inc. is set for an in-depth European Union investigation over concerns the deal could harm global competition for software used by designers.” The EU’s in-depth probe is set to run until December 14th, so the future of the deal will stay unclear until then.

Molly shares the best practices for working with color that she learned from the Adobe Spectrum design system.

Missed that piece at Forbes a few weeks ago: ​“If you ask me, the antitrust environment right now is kind of nuts. […] I’m going to apply similar thinking to Adobe’s proposed $20 billion acquisition of Figma. The short version: I believe this deal is a sound one, and that regulators who are dubious about it are looking at the wrong things if they really want to promote innovation and protect customers.”

Interesting note on Adobe XD: ​“At one point, XD had 200 people working on it, but the product lacked the real-time collaborative element that drives Figma’s success, and sales never took off. Adobe ultimately reassigned more than 90% of the people working on XD; fewer than 20 work on the app now, and their job is just to keep it running smoothly to fulfill existing contracts.”

“After a year of exponential growth and a successful beta, Figma and Google for Education are doubling down on the promise of bringing design and technology tooling on Chromebooks to K12 students across the US and Japan. […] Today, we are excited to take another step forward in this journey by opening up free Figma access to all K‑12 districts across the US.”

“Apple’s initial visionOS design kit for Figma contains a comprehensive set of UI components, views, system interfaces, text styles, color styles, and materials. All of the core ingredients you need to quickly create highly realistic visionOS app designs.” See also Designing for visionOS at Apple Design Resources.

The first segment of the opening talk of the second day, with Noah Levin and Diagram team discussing how AI will shape our future and work. Continue by watching Generative AI and Creative Arms Race by Ovetta Patrice Sampson from Google, AI and empowering creative careers by Scott Belsky and Brooke Hopper from Adobe, and wrap up with The crescendo of AI in our collective future by Kanjun Qiu and Reid Hoffman.

“159 variables across 13 modes, totaling 1,843 values” — cheers to the Figma API!

Cool to see how Atlassian has already rolled out the variables support to their massive Components and Design Tokens libraries.

Linear wins the most over-the-top plugin page award. The new plugin enables designers and engineers to collaborate seamlessly without the need to switch tools or context by creating and linking to issues directly from Figma, navigating design tasks in context, and collaborating across teams and tools.

First the iOS kit, and now the official design library and templates for macOS Sonoma from Apple!

Big day for the Figma community! After years of making official design resources only for Sketch, Adobe XD, and Photoshop (!), Apple finally launched a Figma community page and published a UI kit for iOS 17 and iPadOS 17. (Interestingly, this seems to be the first community resource requiring accepting Terms of Service before opening.)

Let’s use this opportunity to thank Joey Banks for his community service in building many iOS kits over the years, starting with iOS 13!

Free virtual try-on for the Vision Pro, because let’s be fair — we all need one now.

Zander with just-in-time tips on creating a spatial UI for Vision Pro, supafast!

Landa Dong, Design Evangelist at Apple, recommends three must-watch videos from WWDC23 on designing for Apple Vision Pro — ​“Principles of spatial design”, ​“Design for spatial interfaces”, and ​“Design for spatial input”.

Scott Belsky, Chief Product Officer of Adobe, on a new superpower feature launched today in beta: ​“Powered by Firefly, our generative AI family of models, Photoshop now lets you summon new objects and augment creations layer by layer.” This is incredible, and I’m very bullish on Adobe’s vision for integrating generative AI into creator tools.

You know I love color tooling! GitHub has been doing some excellent work on its color system, which is the foundation of the Primer design system. Last year they wrote about building internal color tooling for theme building, and in the new post, they share their process for making contrast changes in both default light and dark modes as part of GitHub’s larger accessibility strategy.