Luis and Molly discuss how every small and large decision was made in Figma’s Simple Design System.

Mihika Kapoor and Yuhki Yamashita gave a talk at the Lenny and Friends Summit on doing product reviews the right way. While I look forward to watching the full video when it’s available, the slides are pretty comprehensive. They point out that the main goal of product reviews is not making decisions but winning trust.

“After months of iterative development, including a closed beta and continuous refinement using our eval plugin, we were ready for a broader launch. Looking back, shipping this work was guided by four key principles: 1) AI for existing workflows: We applied AI to streamline tasks that users already perform, like file browsing and copying frames into their current file. 2) Rapid iteration: We continuously shipped updates to our staging environment, using insights from our internal beta to refine features. 3) Systematic quality checks: We developed custom evaluation tools to monitor and improve search result accuracy. 4) Cross-disciplinary teamwork: Our success stemmed from close cooperation across product, content, engineering, and research.”

“How do you design an app for 431 diverse national parks and monuments? By taking a page from iconic NPS park brochures. Learn how a small team adapted Massimo Vignelli’s seminal design system for a digital interface.”

At a recent meetup, Developer Advocate Jake Albaugh shared the story of Figma’s SDS, a UI kit with a realistic code backing to help bridge the gap between design and development. As a reminder, the Simple Design System is available in the Libraries selector, Figma community, and GitHub.

Claire Butler, a marketing lead at Figma, shares three principles that help market to designers or other groups of passionate experts. Make sure to watch the video she is referring to.

I furiously nodded while reading her second lesson: ​“If you can come up with and understand all of the content, you haven’t gone deep enough. Whatever you are doing will come across too generic, and thus will not resonate. They’ll sniff you out.”

Luis has been working on his version of the kit for over a month, and now it’s finally available in the Figma community. Even includes a new Sidebar component that was released last Friday!

After the Figma library recommended by shadcn wasn’t updated in 2 years, I love all the new resources popping up! Yauheni created a free and open-source Figma library for the shadcn/​ui component and documented his process on X.

Kudos to Oğuz for his patience while creating such a sleek and advanced animation with just a Figma prototype. That’s a lot of frames to connect.

A good demo of all Figma AI features by Tair from a few months ago.

Beautiful radial navigation made by Mark Bennett.

Rogie is just showing off with this beautiful artwork.

James McDonald shared a design file of his recent project with a few cool effects.

Misha Frolov provides an overview of how the new AI tools change the workflow.

Linear launched a series of conversations with product leaders on how things of quality get built: ​“What is quality? It seems hard to describe and even harder to measure, but you can feel it when it’s there. You know it when you experience it.”

A great written interview with Katie Dill, Stripe’s Head of Design, about craft and quality, functionality and beauty in products, rituals to level up product quality, and keeping quality a priority as companies scale.

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

“Join Luis from Figma and Daniel Henderson-Ede to talk all things accessibility with components, variables, and design at scale. Daniel is an accessibility expert and has contributed to the CVS accessibility kit, now used by companies, and has inspired new kits from GitHub, to document how components can be used and handed off to development teams.”

Smashing Magazine interviewed Björn Ottosson, the Swedish engineer who created Oklab color space, about developing an effective model with good hue uniformity that handles lightness and saturation well, and how it spread across the ecosystem.

One of the most common problems that Oklch solves: ​“One problem with sRGB is that in a gradient between blue and white, it becomes a bit purple in the middle of the transition. That’s because sRGB really isn’t created to mimic how the eye sees colors; rather, it is based on how CRT monitors work. That means it works with certain frequencies of red, green, and blue, and also the non-linear coding called gamma. It’s a miracle it works as well as it does, but it’s not connected to color perception.”

Jenny Xie interviewed Marcin Wichary, Joel Miller, Ryhan Hassan, and KC Oh about the new Figma UI: ​“Our goal with UI3 is to keep designers in the flow by minimizing distractions and placing their work center stage. With that north star in mind, our team worked for over two years, iterating on myriad approaches — even reversing some core design decisions, like the floating navigation and properties panels, after launch.”