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!

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

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!

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.

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?’”