Jake Albaugh, Developer Advocate at Figma, walks through setting up Code Connect from scratch — the NPM package, the config file, and mapping design properties to production code properties. The real payoff comes when he shows the before/​after through the MCP server: without Code Connect, an agent sees a flood of raw style data; with it, it sees clean, minimal component code it can actually act on. Unfortunately, Code Connect is still not available on the Pro plan.

Nikita Prokopov makes the case that great UI isn’t just about nailing the start and end states of an animation, it’s about every frame in between. His rule of thumb: if you freeze the screen at any moment, you should be able to explain what you’re looking at. The post walks through a set of GIF examples — from Safari’s misaligned cursor-and-placeholder animation to YouTube’s inexplicable rectangle transition — showing how mid-animation frames that don’t hold up on their own erode user trust.

Video upload cap goes from 100 MB to 300 MB across Design, FigJam, Slides, Sites, and Buzz on paid plans.

Rachel from Figma’s Show Your Work series walks through her file and breaks down three categories where slots reshaped her system: repeating elements like menus and tabs (where she keeps nested subcomponents as default content so system-level edits still propagate), free-form areas like sheets and modals (where she often ships zero default content because designers just delete it anyway), and experimental page-level templates that ​“start to feel a lot more like code.”

Gavin Potenza’s image layout engine for Figma hit v3.0. Select images on canvas, pick one of four layout modes — Grid, Editorial, Masonry, or Cluster — and it composes a moodboard in one click, up to 40 images. The new release adds video support, subject-aware crops that keep faces and focal points in frame, and remixing to re-roll a composition within the same layout family.

The Community profile redesign adds role, experience, tech stack, pinned work with images and links, and social channels. Combined with the FigPal customization, it reads less like a profile page and more like a creator landing page. Figma clearly wants Community to function as a discovery layer for designers, not just for resources.

Slots in Figma Design just got a set of guardrails: min/​max layer counts, instance restrictions to limit what can go inside a slot, an empty-slot default so slots stay visible on canvas, and auto-fill behavior. Slots are now generally available, and these controls make them genuinely safe to use at scale.

Buzz’s spreadsheet-driven asset generation gets the obvious next step: multi-select cells in the table view to edit copy, swap brand imagery, or change sizes across hundreds of variants at once. Resize works on a single asset or the full set, with preset or custom channel sizes to fan out a campaign in one operation.

Name slide rows, drag to reorder them, and jump between sections directly from Presenter or Audience View. Sections also show up in the layers panel in Design Mode, which keeps long decks navigable as they grow.

Lauren Budorick, a software engineer at Figma, walks through six optimizations behind a recent ​“10x faster vector editing” announcement.

A few updates to Grids – reorder columns and rows by dragging, automatic positioning, and automatic rows – the last one is my favorite!

Variable Sync to Repo, from Luis Ouriach, pushes and pulls variable collections between Figma and Git in both directions. Worth pairing with his ​“Adoption is a Red Herring” essay above — both are arguments for treating the design system as infrastructure that has to meet people where they are, including the engineers consuming tokens through a package manager.

The May edition is mostly a demo of Figma’s MCP server, with Amy Lima and Anthony DiSpezio walking through three workflows: code-to-canvas import of a vibe-coded prototype, round-tripping a dark mode so variables stay in sync between code and Figma, and using the pre-installed figma-use-scale skill to generate first-pass directions on a production dashboard. The closing update reel includes vector editing up to 10x faster, memory warnings down 92%, macOS eyedropper now samples anywhere on screen, FigJam MCP can read and write boards (ERDs, architecture diagrams), Make Kit packages your design system’s code for Figma Make, and Weave gets a timeline for video.

Brian Lovin shows the Notion design team’s Prototype Playground, a single Next.js repo on Vercel where every designer gets a namespaced folder and a small set of shared Notion-flavored components. The interesting parts are not the scaffolding but the slash commands and skills layered on top: /figma runs a three-phase loop with the Figma MCP and Chrome DevTools MCP until the build matches the source (~80% on the first try), and a find-icon skill writes its own TypeScript search script after the team got tired of Claude hallucinating ​“search-icon.” See also the Stripe and Vercel pieces below for the same pattern at other companies, as well as another interview with Brian at Dive Club.

Owen Williams, design manager at Stripe, walks Claire Vo through Protodash, the internal prototyping platform he’s been building for 18 months. The V1 was a bundle of Cursor rules plus an MCP server wired to Sail, Stripe’s design system, so any designer can open the repo and build a page without ever touching React or routing. V2 wraps the whole thing in a browser UI running on internal dev boxes, with embedded LLM chat, click-to-annotate feedback, a design review mode, and fidelity toggles (monospace, grayscale) to signal work-in-progress. The same pattern as the Notion and Vercel pieces in this section: production design system plus a thin internal harness, calibrated to one team’s review culture in a way no off-the-shelf tool can be.

Three desktop wins shipped together: search across open and recently closed tabs, content pre-loads so files open faster, and Figma links now open directly in desktop tabs instead of bouncing through the browser. The third one alone removes a daily papercut for anyone who lives in the desktop app.

Server-to-server auth that doesn’t break when someone leaves the company. PLANTs are scoped to the plan, audited centrally, and come with higher rate limits for automation workloads. Important if you maintain Figma integrations as part of internal tooling on an Org or Enterprise plan.

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!

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.”