“Create a personalized virtual badge for Config 2025! Make it your own by adding stickers and don’t forget to share your badge on social to connect with virtual and IRL attendees!”

A preview of an interesting new ​“design system tool for the AI era”. Imports design from Figma, creates a new component, and makes it instantly installable with the shadcn CLI tool.

New color plugin from Evil Martians! Lots of smart ideas and nice touches, as if Accessible Palette got a younger and cooler sibling. Happy to see this team keeps making color tools better. ​“Harmonizer generates accessible, consistent color palettes for user interfaces. Using the OKLCH color model and APCA contrast formula, Harmonizer helps you create color palettes with consistent chroma and contrast across all levels and hues.”

The new version of the most advanced color picker for Figma, supporting OkLCH color space and APCA & WCAG contrast measurement algorithms. This update includes new square rendering for OkLCH, arrow keys and wheel support in the color picker, automatic detection of the document color mode, Figma UI3 update, and math support in the inputs — see the full release notes.

Meng To shows how to generate designs in Aura and bring them to Figma. He includes a Figma file with 57 examples and they look pretty good!

John Maeda: ​“Even with these shifts, I don’t believe AI is replacing designers. If anything, it’s forcing us to focus on what only humans can provide: judgment, empathy, ethics, and the ability to ask the right questions. AI lets us scale and experiment in ways that weren’t possible before, but meaning, care, and resonance still come from human insight and intent.”

“What seemed like a straightforward request — add a horizontal scroll bar to the Layers panel in Figma — presented unexpected challenges. Here’s how the design and engineering teams iterated and prototyped to find the right solution.”

“In UX design, a single misplaced verb can lead users astray, frustrating their expectations and creating confusion. That’s why UX Writer Henry Freedland chose his words very carefully when he was brought in to help polish a new prototyping feature.”

“Preline UI Figma is the largest free design system for Figma, crafted with Tailwind CSS styles and Preline UI components with extra top-notch additions.”

In another article, Luis Ouriach shares tools that save him hours when starting a new design system and introduces 9 recent design systems features (covered in Issue #206) that address some common frustrations.

Andrew Hogan, Head of Insights at Figma: ​“With AI and the momentum around ​“just doing things,” we’re embracing experimentation and building at an eye-watering pace. Still, it’s up to us to steer these tools in the right direction—and if history is any guide, the most valuable innovations may be just around the corner.”

Figma explores five key takeaways from the report, and what they say about the state of design and development: agentic AI is the fastest growing product category; design and best practices are even more important for AI-powered products than traditional ones; smaller companies are going all in; designers are less satisfied with the output of AI tools than developers; there are still questions about how to use AI to make people better at their role.

A new Config talk just got announced: production designer Jeremy Hindle will talk about the creative vision behind Severance.

The new Edit Image feature allows changing an image using prompts, powered by gpt-image‑1. The Make an Image feature got an AI model picker so users can choose between gpt-image‑1, Gemini Imagen 3, or Titan V2. Additionally, the AI beta was rolled out to all Professional, Organization, and Enterprise plans. If you’re not seeing AI features, check that your Admin has your AI access toggle turned on.

If you’re curious about the new gpt-image‑1 model, check out this announcement from OpenAI: ​“Today, we’re bringing the natively multimodal model that powers this experience in ChatGPT to the API via gpt-image‑1, enabling developers and businesses to easily integrate high-quality, professional-grade image generation directly into their own tools and platforms. The model’s versatility allows it to create images across diverse styles, faithfully follow custom guidelines, leverage world knowledge, and accurately render text—unlocking countless practical applications across multiple domains.”

What a wonderful and heartful video by brand designer Devin Mathews. I enjoyed every minute of it and immediately subscribed to the channel — hope there is more to come! ​“I’ve designed for Apple, Nike, Google: some of the biggest and most influential companies in the world. After some reflection and a mini midlife crisis, I decided to take on my most ambitious project yet, rebranding a small local sandwich shop for free!”

After reading Lenny’s Newsletter for a few years, I’ve recently changed to an annual subscription to benefit from the incredible value of this bundle. In addition to free annual plans of great productivity tools Linear, Notion, Perplexity Pro, Superhuman, and Granola, the bundle now also offers the hottest AI tools Bolt, Lovable, Replit, and v0.

Robert Bye reflects on his time at Figma. I love the way he defines product sense as ​“Reading data + Listening to users + Taste + Intuition + Craft”. Here is how to develop it: ​“I’ve come to believe that product sense isn’t really something you can learn in the traditional sense. You can’t just read a book or take a course and expect to be good at it. It’s something you develop over time – by being curious, by trying things out, and most importantly, by surrounding yourself with people who have great taste who are willing to constructively critique each other’s work.”

The last release before the Android 16 update to the biggest Material You UI Kit.

The design community never lets a good meme opportunity go to waste. ​“Figma slapped Swedish AI coding startup Loveable with a cease-and-desist warning for naming one of its new product features ​“Dev Mode.” It turns out Figma successfully trademarked the term Dev Mode in November last year, according to the US Patent and Trademark office, having introduced its own Dev Mode feature in 2023.”