Articles

Monotype published a new kind of trends report for 2025: ​“Ancient oracles peered into the future. From a specific point in time, they forecast what could come. That’s what we want this report to be: a typographic oracle. We want to mark this moment in time, to celebrate design and typography’s progress, and to challenge all of us to envision what lies ahead by looking at the larger cultural forces shaping our time and work.”

I love mid-century modern architecture and furniture, and Herman Miller is one of the most iconic brands. Order created an identity system establishing a new but familiar foundation for their visual language, capturing and building on its rich history and influence. Incredible case study covering brand history and modern brand application. Don’t miss the identity guidelines website as well.

“Collaboration tools like Figma promise streamlined workflows and collective creativity, but there’s a darker side: too many opinions, endless edits, and a loss of individual vision. In this piece, we explore whether Figma’s collaborative power might actually hinder great design by inviting too many cooks into the kitchen.”

(Read without a paywall.) Bloomberg: ​“Design startup Figma Inc. plans to double the number of employees in its New York office over the next nine years, taking advantage of state subsidies to continue to add to an expanding workforce. San Francisco-based Figma now has 1,600 employees, up from 500 at the start of 2022, a spokesperson said. The New York office, Figma’s second biggest, will grow to about 500 people by 2034, supported by a tax credit from the state.”

(Read without a paywall.) The New York Times reports: ​“Figma, a cloud-based design platform, has met with investment banks in recent weeks to discuss an initial public offering that could come as soon as this year, two people with knowledge of the matter said.”

Figma shared new details about connected projects that will launch in the first half of 2025. They let two separate teams or organizations — like an agency and a client — collaborate on a shared project using billable seats from their plans without paying for extra seats. Pro users can connect up to 3 projects, Organization 6 and Enterprise 15. The plan of the team initiating a connected project determines features available to all users collaborating on the project. Resources like shared libraries and fonts can be enabled for everyone.

Gabriella shares her take on Scott Belsky’s article Collapsing the Talent Stack (which I also highly recommend): ​“I’ll start with what it means to collapse the talent stack. My interpretation is that it’s about having the same person own multiple parts of a process, and therefore naturally, have the same person act as multiple ​“roles”. It’s when the designer owns copy across the product, and therefore, owns the responsibilities of what other companies might hire the specialized role of ​“copywriter” for. Or a product manager running and analyzing user interviews, owning traditional responsibilities of a ​“user researcher”. It’s about streamlining work so that a single person handles as much of the process as possible.”

“See when teammates and invited guests last visited your Figma files, helping you track engagement and keep projects moving forward.”

Xinran Ma walks through the creation of an AI automation that instantly categorizes Figma comments and generates a structured summary in Google Docs.

“At trusted titles like The New York Times, The Economist, and The Minnesota Star Tribune, great design can support great journalism. Here’s how media teams use Figma to collaborate on news design and explore new formats.”

Euphrates Dahout, Senior UX Designer on Google’s Material Design team, on how harnessing user feedback made Material 3 the world’s most popular design kit: ​”As a UX Designer and the manager of the Material 3 Design Kit — a Figma library with 3.5 million users and counting — I’ve had to learn the hard way not to take negative feedback personally. Today, I’ve fully embraced comments. I believe that reading and considering this feedback is an essential part of making a valuable design resource. Whether positive or negative, user feedback helps me and the Material team get people what they need.”

Carly Ayres asks the Figma community to weigh in on Andrej Karpathy’s ​“vibe coding.” ​“Perhaps the question isn’t whether vibe coding will replace traditional development—it won’t—but rather how it might expand who can build software and how we build it.”

Creators can now add structured tags to boost visibility and make it easier for you to find the right templates, UI kits, or design assets in Figma.

“There’s a lot of buzz about AI agents. Robots that do more with less supervision—what could go wrong? We asked our community how this might shake up how we think about UX.”

A first look at who’ll be taking the stage at Config in San Francisco this May: Andrew ​“Boz” Bosworth, CTO at Meta; Ebi Atawodi, Director of Product Management at YouTube Studio; Joel Lewenstein, Head of Product Design at Anthropic; Dr. Madeline Gannon; Karri Saarinen, Linear co-founder and CEO, and more.

“Behind every successful design system lies a surprising secret: numbers. Learn how tracking the right metrics can transform your design system from a helpful resource into a powerful engine for efficiency.”

Org and Enterprise customers can now find styles and variables data in their analytics reporting within Figma. This is in addition to the existing component data for a given library. Library Analytics API is out of beta and includes styles and variables data as well, but it’s only available to Enterprise customers.

When exporting a raster image (JPG, PNG, PDF), now you can choose an image resampling option. Image resampling helps maintain the quality of your exports by determining the color of each pixel. It’s useful when exporting images to different sizes or a vector design to a raster format.

The Detailed option (default) uses an image resampling method called ​“bicubic sampling.” This method looks at each pixel and uses a weighted average of at least four surrounding pixels from the original image for export. Best used when optimizing for detail in exports, such as high-quality images, vector art, and assets with gradients or drop shadows.

The Basic option uses an image resampling method known as ​“nearest neighbor sampling.” This method looks at pixels from the original image and finds the closest matching pixel to use for the export. Best used when optimizing for hard lines in assets or for assets that don’t need finer details, like icons, low-resolution images, and pixel art.

The Tinloof team compiled a wishlist of Figma features that would improve their daily workflows. It’s divided into two categories: must-have features that address fundamental workflow limitations and nice-to-have enhancements that add extra polish to an already excellent tool. (This post was published two months ago, and it’s great to see that a few points have already been addressed.)

Lewis Healey, Lead Designer at Atlassian Design Systems, looks ahead at the industry, the tools, and the people. His predictions: AI will integrate into delivery workflows, tooling will bridge the craft gap, aspirational design libraries will phase out, accessibility will be the default, and systems will become more streamlined.