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.

Adobe announced Firefly, a family of creative generative AI models coming to Adobe products. The integration with Creative Suite and responsible generative AI is what makes it potentially very interesting. I also like that it’s positioned (similarly to GitHub’s Copilot) as a productivity tool and not a substitute for creators. For more context, see this thread by Sudharshan and another one by Linus with mind-blowing examples.

Bloomberg reports (see the Google cache version without the paywall) that the United States Department of Justice is preparing an antitrust lawsuit seeking to block Adobe’s $20 billion acquisition of Figma. A case is expected to be filed as soon as next month. ​“The antitrust division is concerned the deal — one of the largest takeovers of a private software maker — would reduce options for design software used by creative professionals.”

The team at Figma talked to several industry experts from Google’s Material Design team, Spotify, Shopify, and Stripe about how they’re managing the future of design systems — from tooling to automation to accessibility. 

In this tutorial thread, Fons Mans walks through the steps of creating Linear-like gradients. The community file is available as well.

“Tune in to hear from Dominique Ward, Head of DesignOps at Atlassian, and Adam Fry-Pierce, Chief of Staff at Google, who will dive in to how to scale your DesignOps team. They will dive into questions such as ​‘What frameworks can you use to build out L&D on the design team?’ or ​‘How do you build rapport with your cross functional teams?’”

Back in October, Linear launched a new home page that went down under a DDoS attack. In a genius move to save the day, they’ve redirected their domain to the Figma file with a home page design and hosted a live Q&A right there. In this post, Figma and Linear discuss how it happened and what they learned.

New article and Figma resources from Spotify Design: ​“If we only design for speedy devices, we also risk finding out late in the development process that our feature performs poorly on devices used in emerging markets — and at this point, it can be costly and painful to make significant changes. When designing for a global audience, we have to do better, which is why we developed Performance Context Cards and Performance Action Cards: tools for our teams (and yours) to use during certain stages of the product design process.”

“At Uber, we’ve built a cross-platform design system with hundreds of thousands of weekly Figma inserts and an accompanying super plugin. But like everyone, we started with only a few components and multiple one-off plugins. We’ve carefully matured our design system through data and heart. Yet it hasn’t been straightforward. There’s a constant tension between what designers and developers need and how we interpret data. These growing pains only seem to get worse the more a system evolves. In this session, we’ll show you that data and heart don’t have to be at odds as we share how we mature our design system and plugins. Through demos of AI-driven tooling, we’ll explore the role data can play in the future and help your team scale your system by balancing numbers with heart.”

Nilay Patel from The Verge interviews Dylan Field for the Decoder podcast. It’s the longest and sharpest interview since the acquisition — an absolute must-read. ​“So I wanted to talk to Dylan about the deal, why he’s doing it, how he made the decision to sell, and what things he can do as part of Adobe that he couldn’t do as an independent company. Dylan’s also a pretty expansive thinker, so after we talked about his company getting the ​“fuck you” money from Adobe, we talked about making VR Figma for the metaverse and AGI, which is artificial general intelligence, or the kind of AI that can fully think for itself.”

“The Justice Department is preparing to open an in-depth investigation of Adobe’s $20 billion takeover of design collaboration company Figma, according to four people with knowledge of the matter and a document viewed by POLITICO.”

Google’s Material Design team introduced Relay, a new process to transform Figma components into Android UI code. Designers can now use the Relay for Figma plugin to document and package UI component designs that can be sent directly to the developer. No more tedious design specs or back and forth to ensure details are right in implemented code.

What a dumpster fire. It seems to be Pantone’s decision, but both companies look awful now.

In this CNBC interview, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen shares his thoughts on the company’s plans to acquire Figma and innovation in a hybrid work environment.

A short thread of a few hints on the future of Figma from the Adobe Max conference.

One of the most interesting takes on the acquisition I’ve read so far. Wenting Zhang left Adobe over a year ago, but before that she spent 1.5 years working on Adobe XD and 5 years on Adobe Fonts (ex-Typekit). While as an ADBE investor she has a clear bias about the price, her observation about the org chart oddity is really interesting.

Linear launched a new gorgeous home page and did a Q&A party in a Figma file while the website was under a DDoS attack. The file is read-only but still fun to explore and review the questions and answers from the team.

Figma is partnering with Google on building ​“smart chips” into Google Docs. In the case of Figma and FigJam that will be a visual thumbnail of the project. Available to all users starting January 2023.

A live stream of a discussion between GitHub Education and Figma Education teams.