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.

Karri Saarinen, cofounder and CEO of Linear: ​“Adobe missed the one of the largest transformations in the design industry and lost the product designers for over a decade. Spending $20B on Figma is their ticket back in and hopefully evolving their thinking from the ​“software in a box” model.” Also love his take on Sketch ​“building a tool for a designer vs. building a tool for teams”.

A good summary of topics discussed at the Figma All-Hands call on September 16th.

Dann Petty hosted an open chat about Figma’s acquisition with Scott Belsky from Adobe.

Nice thread from Nathan Barry, founder of Convertkit, on Figma’s dominance.

Great point by Wendy Johansson on a positive side effect of this deal.

MDS with another take on Figma/​Adobe: ​“The magic happens in the details and typically in things that you didn’t plan for”.