Makes now run natively on the Figma mobile app for on-device testing and touch interaction previews. Mobile creation and editing is coming soon.

Pica is a native macOS font manager from Josh Puckett, built for designers who want proper font organization. ​“Organize into collections, test color themes and logos, watch folders, manage what’s installed, and much more.”

Figma ships a meaningful performance update across the board: 10x faster vector editing, 4x smoother Make frame rates, faster load times, 92% fewer memory warnings. Just the memory side of this update was six months in the making!

Hugo Raymond breaks down Swap Instance vs. Slots as two ends of a control–composability spectrum: Swap Instance hard-locks a single nested component in a fixed position, while Slots act like open containers that accept almost anything and can be freely rearranged. For design system teams, his key point is that the ​“right” choice isn’t about which feature is more powerful, but about how much you trust consumers of your components and whether you fear incorrect composition more than full detachment from the library.

The updated eyedropper is no longer limited to the Figma canvas. On the macOS desktop app, it now samples from anywhere on screen — browsers, design references, anything open.

No more jumping to prototype mode just to check a video. Figma now surfaces playback controls on video files directly in Design and Draw — play, pause, fullscreen, and speed controls all on canvas.

Gavin Potenza built a Figma plugin that automatically lays out moodboards.

Font choices for dense developer tool UIs require different thinking than consumer UI. Anton Lovchikov covers what actually matters — having both sans and mono fonts in the same family, vertical metrics, text rendering, variability — in an article worth saving if you work on data-heavy or developer-facing products.

Yep! Type Foundry introduces Unifora, a uniwidth variable sans-serif superfamily. If you aren’t familiar with uniwidth typefaces, it’s worth checking out details of this project. Two years dedicated to a single constraint: every weight, every width, every slant — same character widths. This solves a real problem for interface designers: text that doesn’t reflow when you switch from regular to bold.

The spring survey from UX Tools shows how fragmented AI adoption actually is in design: a third of designers do no AI-generated code work, a third say it’s almost all of their building, and a third fall somewhere in between. The split is sharpest by role — design engineers are 80.9% AI-assisted; researchers express the most anxiety.

Pair the Emil Kowalski skill with the Jakub Krehel skill above, and you’ve got a solid baseline of design engineering taste baked into your AI coding workflow. Emil’s focus is specifically on animations — spring physics, performance, and interruptibility.

Admins can now purchase additional AI credits in Figma, either as a subscription with volume-based pricing or pay-as-you-go for variable usage. Available now for Organization and Enterprise plans, coming to Professional in May.

Figma Community now includes Apps, a new category that connects Figma to external tools, including AI systems and third-party products. Find them in Extensions alongside plugins and widgets.

Patrick Morgan makes a clean distinction that vibe-coding discourse keeps blurring: prototype code is for exploration, production code is for endurance. He is building a protected prototyping environment using Claude Code, a place where his team can move fast and then deliberately port the right assets across the boundary into production.

There is a clear parallel with how the design team at Notion works. In the recent episode of How I AI, Brian Lovin showed their collaborative ​“prototype playground,” where the entire team can create, share, and iterate on functional prototypes.

That also reminded me of how my team worked a decade ago, back when front-end development was a tad simpler. We had a separate ​“mockups” directory inside the Rails monorepo, where designers prepared static HTML mockups with production-ready CSS and JS. By the time designs were handed off to engineers in a feature branch, all polish and design details were already baked in. The design team must be fairly technical, but there is no going back to handing off Figma files after working this way.

Slots are finally here! This hands-on tutorial explains building flexible components with Slots and covers the practical workflow, from setting up a slot inside a component to configuring preferred instances so designers know exactly what content belongs there.

It’s time to pay respect to the original ​“slot component” technique, shared by Ridd back in 2021. Thanks for your service, you’ve served us well.

Designer Advocate Brett McMillin covers the fundamentals: what slots are, how to add them to components, and the mental model for thinking about content-structure separation in design.

Five practical strategies for integrating Slots into a design system, sourced from teams who’ve been testing the feature since Schema 2025. The most actionable tip is to start with the components people detach the most — that’s where Slots will deliver the fastest payoff. I also liked the tip of using pre-filled slots where content is predictable, and empty slots where designers need to add something on their own.

Code Connect keeps getting more ​“real-world design system” friendly: you can now attach multiple code files to a single Figma component, preview code across frameworks (with GitHub connected), and set framework-specific MCP instructions so agents implement the right thing. This is one of those unsexy updates that makes Code Connect actually usable across multi-framework orgs (or even just ​“web + native + marketing site”).

Cole Derochie from Shopify made a plugin for simulating an LLM streaming experience — make sure to check out the demo.

You can now type directly in the hex code input to access your color variables and styles. Lots of smart details: enter a hex value and see all variables and styles using it, colors are surfaced based on the context, and related terms are baked into the new algorithm (i.e., finding your ​“danger” variable when searching for ​“error”).