Ryo Lu replies: ​“Great tools should unify, not fragment. They should connect the designer’s canvas with the builder’s editor, connect the writer’s outline with the team’s roadmap, and let patterns repeat and evolve across everything instead of trapping them in separate silos. Designers can build. Builders can design. The old line between ​“design tools” and ​“dev tools” is an artifact of the software we had, not the people we are.”

Nice improvement to the Cursor Browser, providing a quick way to tweak design. It’s not a replacement for Figma, but a more hands-on way to make changes without prompting or switching to code. Who would think this feature could initiate a big design debate?

“We’re excited to release a visual editor for the Cursor Browser. It brings together your web app, codebase, and powerful visual editing tools, all in the same window. You can drag elements around, inspect components and props directly, and describe changes while pointing and clicking. Now, interfaces in your product are more immediate and intuitive, closing the gap between design and code.”

Fantastic update to shadcn/​ui — now you can pick your component library (Radix UI or Base UI), visual style, theme, icon set, base color, fonts, and build something that doesn’t look like everything else. Shadcn/​ui was always highly customizable thanks to well-thought-out design primitives and treating components as a boilerplate, but this release takes it to the next level.

The new all-in-one Affinity app, combining Pixel, Vector, and Layout, is now completely free. Only AI tools are locked behind the Canva premium plans — I’m wary of free tools, but this is an interesting strategy.

Speaking of shadcn, Vercel launched a free course on the fundamentals of modern UI development with shadcn/​ui. I’m happy to see a high-quality introductory resource for teams adopting this stack, as a mental shift from building with homegrown intertwined components to a composable, reusable, and themeable library could be challenging.

A great resource for front-end engineers from Vercel, authored by shadcn and Hayden Bleasel: ​“Modern web applications are built on reusable UI components and how we design, build, and share them is important. This specification aims to establish a formal, open standard for building open-source UI components for the modern web.”

As new tools blur the lines between design and engineering, I strongly believe that any designer working on or contributing to a design system will benefit from understanding these concepts.

Tailwind CSS joins Paper as investors and partners to ​“do whatever we can to help make Paper the absolute best design tool in the world for modern web teams.” Lately, Tailwind CSS has gotten strong tailwinds from AI codegen tools, as this standardized and encapsulated approach to styling works great both for humans and LLMs. Excited to see what a deeper integration with the design tool might look like.

Matt Wierzbicki shows how to turn Figma designs made with shadcn/​ui into production‑ready code by setting up Cursor to use shadcn/​ui and Figma MCPs.

“Figma is for practical business application.” The marketing team has been killing it with recent promo videos!

“Figma Draw pairs faster, simpler vector editing with powerful tools for visual expression — so designers of all stripes can bring their vision to life without breaking focus.” One thing I keep wondering about is how much visual design will change in the coming months. Medium and tools define the end result, and Figma just got way more powerful and artistic.

The new curved connectors mode for right-brained people. I’ll stick to my neatly organized ​“elbowed” connectors.

Jay chats with Natasha Tenggoro who shows how she designed AI features for Figma Slides. You will learn about Natasha’s design process, AI design, designing shadows, design explorations for Slides and more.

Miggi breaks down his favorite features in Figma Slides, including automatically changing text color for accessibility, choosing slide templates from other decks, grid view, slide numbers, live interactions, and more.

The Pragmatic Engineer podcast: ​“How do you take a new product idea, and turn it into a successful product? Figma Slides started as a hackathon project a year and a half ago – and today it’s a full-on product, with more than 4.5M slide decks created by users. I’m joined by two founding engineers on this project: Jonathan Kaufman and Noah Finer.” Read two interesting takeaways from this episode on X.

Figma Slides is now out of beta and available to everyone with six major new updates: import and export .pptx files, object animations, slide numbers, components, and video improvements. Learn about new features from Noah Finer’s video or read how other teams adopted Slides to tap into a design system, use branded assets, improve collaboration, and get audience feedback.

The public rollout comes with a great commercial. Epic to see Soren Iverson in the main role!

While this video focuses on education, all examples can be easily translated into the work setting. Five creative ways to use pages in FigJam to bring structure, clarity, and collaboration: give each collaborator their own page, set up digital breakout rooms, organize content step-by-step, create resource boards, and keep everything in one spot for easy planning.

Nice built-in support for code blocks with syntax highlighting in Slides.

Rehearse is a clever plugin for Figma Slides — practice your presentation and see exactly how long you spent on each slide and the total time for your deck.

Plugins are now available in Figma Slides, and three dozen plugins have already been updated to support it.