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.

Earlier this year, Jeremy Dizon led the project to enhance the Lyft Product Language (LPL) Native component library. In this blog post, he talks about the strategy they’ve used, the reason behind incorporating lightweight user research, and some key learnings from this 6‑month long project. Sometimes creating a new version of each component is the right approach, and major updates to Figma features provide a good opportunity for this work.

On this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast – Interview Series, the host Daniel Newman is joined by Ashley Still, Senior Vice President of Digital Media/​Marketing, Strategy & Partnerships for Adobe, to take a look at Adobe’s acquisition of Figma.

Casey Newton interviews Dylan Field about antitrust issues, keeping control of his product road map, and whatever DALL‑E and other AI tools might mean for the future of design.

The Wall Street Journal gathered thoughts and concerns on the deal from folks in the industry, including Scott Belsky, Fons Mans, and Yuhki Yamashita.

Matt Stoller: ​“My instinct is that this merger is illegal and that it will be blocked or abandoned. But I’m not 100% sure, as there are also technical issues here that I’m still trying to wrap my head around. But even within the merging parties, there is genuine concern about whether this merger will close. Internally, Adobe executives are already telling employees not to write anything down about the merger for fear it will be found by government investigators.”

During a VC job interview in 2018, Kyle Harrison built a model with Figma becoming a $19B company in 2025. His analysis was called ​“unrealistic”. Good thread on compounding growth, and there is a deeper dive in his newsletter.

Rafa from Layout FM podcast shares his thoughts and predictions after the acquisition. Also, listen to his podcast episode on this topic.