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In her blog post, Alice Packard explores innovative applications of Figma variables beyond traditional light and dark modes. She outlines 11 use cases — including validation styling, asset availability, breakpoints, brand themes, seasonal promotions, subscription levels, loyalty statuses, authentication states, interface density, contrast settings, and levels of fidelity — demonstrating how variables can enhance design systems by enabling dynamic UI adjustments and improving collaboration between designers and developers.

Bold moves from Shopify’s CEO Tobi Lutke, shared in an internal memo. On general AI usage: ​“Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. It’s a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance.”

On prototyping: ​“AI must be part of your GSD Prototype phase. The prototype phase of any GSD project should be dominated by AI exploration. Prototypes are meant for learning and creating information. AI dramatically accelerates this process. You can learn to produce something that other team mates can look at, use, and reason about in a fraction of the time it used to take.”

AI skills will be a part of the performance reviews and affect future hiring. Highly recommend reading an entire thing.

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?”

Designer Advocate Corey Lee wants to help teams understand how to make the shift from just using design to becoming a truly design-driven organization. His central observation was that ​“the highest-performing teams don’t just use design; they embed it across every function.” After months of research and writing, Figma published his ebook to provide teams with insights to build a solid foundation of cross-functional design culture to navigate the current landscape of business and beyond.

“Connected Projects makes it easy for freelancers and agencies on different Figma plans to collaborate seamlessly with clients. Work together to co-edit designs, and share resources like libraries — all while staying on your own Figma seat.”

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.”

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

Advocates Jake Albaugh and Chad Bergman wrote a tactical guide to collaborating with your developer counterparts, including common pitfalls, practical tips, and guidance on when to lean in.

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.”

Freshly baked goodies: FigPals for April Fun Week (extended until April 11); a button for collapsing layers — love that it excludes the layer tree of your selection; quality-of-life improvements to corner radius inputs and flyouts for effects, fills, and layout grids; reordering variables modes and collections; annotations in Design Mode; accessibility contrast in color picker; and finally, an eyedropper added to Dev Mode.

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.”

“Designers crafting elaborate prototypes in Figma to mimic basic digital interactions are essentially building digital Rube Goldberg machines. If you’re going to spend hours creating intricate simulations in Figma, you might as well put that effort directly into code — because in the end, code is where your designs must ultimately function.”

I might be biased, but I don’t see many designers that ​“tweak their Figma files endlessly, push back on any technical constraints, and then smugly hand over their ​“perfect” design — only to be baffled when development comes back with a hundred questions about feasibility”. What I do see is designers learning to program, adopting AI tools like Cursor, and getting heavily involved in building and shipping their vision — and I’m here for that.

Data from the State of the Designer 2025 survey tells us that product builders are mostly happy at work with 41% of designers and developers more satisfied than they were last year. So what impacts their happiness, and how can we drive an upward trend? Here, Figma dives into 5 crucial contributors to happiness: design’s place in the organization, company policies on hybrid work, how leaders empower their teams, effective collaboration and communication, and tools for self-empowerment.

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”.

Figma Slides is now out of beta and available to everyone with six major new updates: import and export .pptx files, object animations, slide numbers, components, and video improvements. Learn about new features from Noah Finer’s video or read how other teams adopted Slides to tap into a design system, use branded assets, improve collaboration, and get audience feedback.

“With our FedRAMP Moderate status officially approved, the public sector can use Figma to brainstorm, design, and build better digital experiences for U.S. citizens.”

“On April 30, we’ll be fully transitioning to UI3, our redesigned interface that puts your work center stage. Here’s what you need to know about the change, along with tips for a smooth transition.”