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.”

I did not expect to see Adobe as an example of best practices: ​“Adobe has seen massive outcry from its customers, when their old T&Cs suggested Adobe *could* train on customer work. This is why I’m baffled Figma enrolls paying customers (if they are non-enterprise) to GenAI training, by default.”

June 25th, 5:30–8:30 PM at GitHub’s SF office. ​“You’ll hear from GitHub designers, developers, and researchers, about their work on design systems, accessibility, brand, and AI.” 

“For the first installment in our series, we sat down with the Linear team who put forth a series of principles to guide their own work. Here, co-founder Jori Lallo and Chief Operating Officer Cristina Cordova share why opinionated software is core to Linear’s methodology, and how other teams can adopt it.”

My favorite part from Jori: ​“Many people try to adapt things from the industry that might not actually be applicable to them, or they might not know the potential downside. They were developed at places that are bigger and growing faster than most companies, so you need to try to understand what’s behind them and adapt pieces of them.”

What I like about Linear is how clearly they define principles and ideas that drive their product decisions. You can either love or hate how opinionated they are, but that clarity is admirable. ​“At Linear we believe software can feel magical. Quality of software is driven by both the talent of its creators and how they feel while they’re crafting it. To bring back the right focus, these are the foundational and evolving ideas Linear is built on.”

A talk from Stripe’s Sessions 2024 conference on why well-crafted products are expressions of care and dedication — and how that correlates to business success. Head of Design Katie Dill kicks it off by talking about the value of quality and dispelling some of the myths and common-held beliefs about craft and beauty — that it is ​“in the eye of the beholder,” purely cosmetic, and at odds with growth. In Stripe’s experience, beauty is objective, functional, and support growth.

Later, she invites the cofounder and CEO of Linear, Karri Saarinen, and the CPO of Figma, Yuhki Yamashita, to share their thoughts on craft and beauty. I like Karri’s separation of these concepts — ​“craft is the mindset and activity you do, and the quality and beauty are the output.” You can also read the recap of this talk on the Figma blog.

Apple added nine new design templates for Figma: Apple Pay, App Clips, Live Activities, iMessage apps and sticker packs, Sign in with Apple, App Shortcuts, Tap to Pay, Tip Kit, and Wallet. See also Apple Design Resourcesin the Developer Center.

Mike Rundle points out interesting implementation details in the Apple Design Resources – visionOS file.

I loved this article by Karri Saarinen from Linear on why redesigns are important and its sequel, ​“How we redesigned the Linear UI,” on tackling that kind of project. ​“This incremental way of building the product is hugely beneficial, and often necessary — though it unbalances the overall design, and leads to design debt. Each new capability adds stress on the product’s existing surfaces for which it was initially designed. Functionality no longer fits in a coherent way. It needs to be rebalanced and rethought.”

On paying off the design debt: ​“While the design debt often happens in small increments, it’s best to be paid in larger sweeps. This goes against the common wisdom in engineering where complete code rewrites are avoided. The difference is that on the engineering side, a modular or incremental way of working can work as the technical implementation is not really visible. Whereas the product experience is holistic and visual.”

On exploring the next version without considering practicality: ​“A secret I’ve learned is that when you tell people a design is a ​“concept” or ​“conceptual” it makes it less likely that the idea is attacked from whatever perspective they hold or problems they see with it. The concept is not perceived as real, but something that can be entertained. By bringing leaders or even teams along with the concept iterations, it starts to solidify the new direction in their mind, eventually becoming more and more familiar. That’s the power of visual design.”

The original reporting by Forbes from last month on employee equity packages refresh and severance program. ​“Under Figma’s compensation update, employees who joined the company in the 16 months since the announced Adobe deal will receive additional shares of Figma, up to 70% of the initial intended value of their pay packages negotiated under the higher $20 billion price tag.”

On the updated valuation: ​“Figma’s move comes as the company must readjust to a startup environment more austere than the one during which it raised $200 million at its original $10 billion valuation in June 2021. Over that period, many startup unicorns […] raised down-rounds or saw their prices in the secondary market slashed. In his messaging to staff reviewed by Forbes, Field admitted that he didn’t know exactly what shares of Figma […] were worth.”