Karri Saarinen from Linear: ​“Prompting is essentially like writing a spec, sometimes it’s hard to articulate exactly what you want and ultimately control the outcome. Two people looking for the same thing might get wildly different results just based on how they asked for it, which creates an unprecedented level of dynamism within the product. This shift from deterministic traditional UI to something more unbridled raises a challenge for designers: with no predictable journeys to optimize, how do you create consistent, high-quality experiences?”

Three primary updates: hide and show variable fills, duplicate and copy styles, and the go-to-main component shortcut (Control+Option+Command+K). See the complete list of quality-of-life updates in the release notes. 

Claire Butler: ​“A love letter to scaling from 10 to 1400 people and 0 to millions of users over a decade as Figma’s first marketing and business hire.” One of my favorite insights: ​“As a product marketer I’d been trained to lead with ​“benefits over features,” but with designers that didn’t work. They cared about what the tool could actually do. They’d believe the benefits once they experienced them.”

“In this interview, Jay chats with Natasha Tenggoro who shows how she designed AI features for FigJam. You will learn about Natasha’s design process, AI design, presenting to leadership and more.”

Nick Babich explores his process of turning design into code using Lovable and Anima and shares the pros and cons of each tool.

An interesting take from The Culturist on why color is vanishing from our world: ​“The underlying theory in all of these cases is that while color is sensory, unstable, and chaotic, form is rational, stable, and pure. Once you see this bias, you begin to notice how deeply it has shaped the modern world — and how it helps explain our current retreat into colorlessness.”

Great post by an industry veteran Mike Davidson, offering a few suggestions to those feeling behind the AI wave already: ​“When it comes down to it, your future in design is the sum of all of your actions that got you here in the first place. The skills you’ve built, the artifacts demonstrated in your portfolio, your helpfulness as a teammate, your reputation as a person, and now more than ever, your curiosity to shed your skin and jump into an undiscovered ocean teeming with new life, hazards, and opportunity. Someone will invent the next CSS, the next Responsive Design, the next sIFR, the next TypeKit, the next IE6 clearfix, and the next Masonry for the AI era. That someone might as well be you.”

Karri Saarinen: ​“The idea that AI might ruin visual quality feels like a non-issue since there wasn’t much quality to ruin in the first place. […] My general view of AI is that it will just let us do more things, not take away things.”

Another after-party on Thursday, May 8 organized by San Francisco UXD with a fully reserved venue that includes a bar, entertainment, and special guests and product demos.

Detach is the premier after-party organized by Jesse Showalter, Tommy Geoco, Femke van Schoonhoven, and Soren Iverson on Wednesday, May 7 where the design community comes together to unwind, connect, and celebrate.

“Sort UI is the ultimate Figma UI Kit, designed to help you build and launch projects up to 10x faster.” Also available for Framer.

So excited to dive into it! ​“This file showcases the UI3 design language from Figma’s internal design system, featuring the styles, components, and variables that help Figma’s design team build products. By sharing this publicly, we hope to support other teams and creators, whether it’s with developing Figma plugins/​widgets, exploring ideas, or even creating your own design guidelines and UI Kits in Figma.”

“This project implements a Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration between Cursor AI and Figma, allowing Cursor to communicate with Figma for reading designs and modifying them programmatically.”

In time for fully transitioning to UI3, Jay chats with Tim Van Damme who shows how he designed UI3 icons in Figma. You will learn about Tim’s icon design process, preserving visual weight, how he makes icons playful, and more. Don’t miss part 2, where they discuss designing UI3.

Figma’s designer advocates, product designers, engineers, and PMs hung out in London to record a mini-series about craft, users, and the design process. In this episode, they discuss the challenges designers face in the industry and how Figma approaches the design process to overcome these challenges. In the following Users episode, they cover how Figma product development teams approach user feedback and incorporate it into their design process.

Ever wondered what a specific design systems term means? Check out this glossary with detailed explanations of 33 common terms.

Always happy to support an argument for adopting OKLCH and Display P3: ​“Many design systems use hex values to represent colours. As far as I’m aware, there’s currently no way to provide a colour space with a hex value in CSS. That’s okay though — the color() function includes a parameter for the colour space. color(display-p3 1 0 0) is bright red in Display P3. In fact, color(1 0 0) is not allowed. A colour space must be provided. Are you noticing a trend? Colour spaces will be required in the future.” 

Tia Sydorenko argues that our interactions with digital systems ​“are not just changing; they are shifting in their very essence.” She builds her argument on this insight from Jakob Nielsen: ​“With the new AI systems, the user no longer tells the computer what to do. Rather, the user tells the computer what outcome they want.”

“Unlike straightforward direct manipulation — such as dragging a file between folders, where actions unfold step by step — AI interactions demand a more fluid, iterative process. Users articulate their goals, but instead of executing every step manually, they collaborate with the system, refining inputs and guiding the AI as it interprets, adjusts, and responds dynamically.”

Linear’s CEO shares his approach to quality at a time when ​“move fast and break things” no longer cuts it. My favorites: ​“Commit to quality at the leadership level”, ​“Do away with handoff”, ​“For quality, you need a team that views the spec as the baseline, not the finish line”, and ​“The simplest way to increase quality is to reduce scope”.

So many great speakers and topics this year! I’m particularly looking forward to talks on programmable colors by Evil Martians, collaborative brand design by Smith & Diction, building digital products as a company of one by my friend Christine Vallaure, designing for early-stage startups by Gabriel Valdivia, typography by Elliot Jay Stocks, and of course a secret deep dive by Rogie King, Tim Van Damme, and Lauren Budorick.