This obviously oversimplified attention-grabber made the rounds on design Twitter last week. Tools, processes, and skills are rapidly changing, but they complement each other. Instead of being line cooks focused on a single station, designers can now prepare an entire meal. However, if the ingredients are undercooked and the sauce is sloppy, that meal won’t be worth much.

Ideation, visual exploration, prototyping, and even building deserve the best tools for the job. Check out insightful takes on this from Noah Levin, Jordan Singer, Ridd, and Jess.

A new sidebar provides a large collection of diagramming shapes for engineers, along with quick access to recently used ones. Stroke color is now independent of fill color for shapes and sections, and connector labels are movable. Additionally, there is an updated color palette with more variety and consistency.

Anima has been working on design-to-code tools since before the recent AI craze. A few months ago, they added support for shadcn/​ui components, which I tried last week on my current project designed with this library.

Unlike v0, they parse the Figma file and get a lot of details right. I was impressed with how accurately it selected shadcn/​ui components, even if layers weren’t explicitly named or instances were detached in the mockup. It becomes obvious that parsing a file is the right approach when different components look the same on the surface. For example, the trigger for opening a dropdown or date picker uses the same button, but they are different Figma components under the hood, and Anima chose their counterparts in code correctly.

Exporting custom colors and typography variables to a Tailwind config is also a nice touch. I ran into a few issues with excessive Tailwind styling and newer shadcn/​ui components like the Sidebar not being recognized, but overall, this clearly feels like the right direction.

First Round’s deep dive into how Figma Slides founding PM Mihika Kapoor transformed a hackathon project into one of Figma’s most anticipated launches.

I loved this example of going deep on a topic using FigJam. Tom Lowry, Figma’s Advocacy Director, shows how he approached researching and building a custom mountain bike by mapping out and thinking through every aspect of the build in FigJam.

Tailwind CSS v4 beta includes a modernized P3 color palette. In this thread, Gleb Stroganov explores and compares the new OKLCH palette to the old one in v3. Tailwind’s adoption of P3 colors might be the tipping point in popularizing wide gamut colors on the web.

Prevent accidental removal of FigJam sections by locking the background of a section.

A new update to Slides lets you bring slides from Figma into a deck with one click.

Brand designer Jamey Gannon made a commercial pitch deck template for early-stage founders raising VC capital. She built dozens of decks in her career for her own rounds or others and used this experience to design this template.

Erez Reznikov argues that in the next generation of design tools, designing and building digital products will have to abide by the constraints of the platform in which they are coded and tested. ​“The right tool will have to be built for a collaboration. A true collaboration, not a handoff. With developers, because complex products (which will be the vast majority) need them. There’s no avoiding that with dreams of magic AI fairy dust and no-code, no-dev narrow builders, empowering as they may seem.”

The annual UX Tools survey is one of the best ways to spot trends and new tools. Please take 5–10 minutes to complete it.

Select multiple layers in Figma Slides and apply edits to them all at once.

You can now lock sections in FigJam to prevent them from accidentally being moved.

1) Add new template styles to your decks directly from the styles overview modal. 2) Rename and delete template styles. 3) Draft presenter notes with AI — ​“just add one line of text to your slide and let AI do the heavy lifting.” 4) You can now edit your presenter notes in Presenter View. 5) The Multi-edit is now available in Figma Slides.

A pretty wild Slides template: ​“The Infinite Scroll is a five-dimensional entity that weaves together the stories of the past, present, and future.”

Yann-Edern Gillet from Linear built a plugin for syncing color and text styles from Figma to Framer.

Co-founders of Sketch shared their stance on AI: ​“We’re not ready to make a move with AI just yet — for reasons that will become clear. However, we wanted to share the principles that will guide our approach when that time comes.”

I respect their position on using AI to aid designers but never to create designs. To me, Make Design was the least exciting AI feature announced at Config, and I’m glad it was reframed as the First Draft during the relaunch a few weeks ago. Their focus on privacy and being local-first is a smart way to differentiate from Figma and offer something unique, even if that required burying Sketch Cloud first.

I didn’t know I needed this until I saw it. Plan the presentation in FigJam, then turn it into a deck outline in Slides: ​“Think it in FigJam, present it in Figma: create a Figma Slides outline from a FigJam board with a few clicks.”

The Foundation generates Figma spacing, color, and typography variables based on Tailwind CSS’s utilities, ensuring consistency across your design and code.

In this webinar, Designer Advocates Corey Lee and Hugo Raymond will guide you through communicating effectively through story-driven presentations and share techniques to up-level your slide designs to make your presentations and decks more compelling. ​“Good design tells a compelling story. How you convey that story can significantly impact its resonance with your audience.“