Articles

“With Figma Buzz, brand designers and marketers have a shared space to build beautiful, on-brand assets at scale.” Non-designers on my team use Canva a lot for event materials and marketing assets, and I can’t wait to set them up with customizable on-brand templates.

“Today we’re introducing Figma Make, a new prompt-to-code capability to help you quickly explore, iterate, and refine — whether it’s generating high-fidelity prototypes or getting into the details in design and code.”

“Today, we’re launching Figma Sites, an all-in-one tool for you to design and build custom, responsive websites. Here, we share how you can go from design to production in the most efficient — and expressive — ways.”

“Figma Draw pairs faster, simpler vector editing with powerful tools for visual expression — so designers of all stripes can bring their vision to life without breaking focus.” One thing I keep wondering about is how much visual design will change in the coming months. Medium and tools define the end result, and Figma just got way more powerful and artistic.

A help article on the new grid flow for Auto Layout.

A grown-up version of zines from previous years. Didn’t read it yet, but flipped through, and it’s a beautiful historic artifact.

If an hour-and-a-half keynote is too long for now, this blog post provides a good recap: ​“Dylan Field runs down everything we launched at Config 2025 and explains why pushing design further matters more now than ever.”

After wrapping up his time as a PM at Figma, Robert Bye reflects on what he learned there and shares a few patterns that he thinks made the difference. This post focuses on craft: ​“There was this unspoken agreement that craft mattered. Everyone, from PMs to engineers to designers, took serious pride in their work. But no one took themselves too seriously. It was confident without ego. People wanted to do great work and genuinely cared.”

Claire Butler demystifies the role of marketing and sales in Figma’s bottoms-up go-to-market (GTM) strategy. It starts with a framework you can apply to your business, and this post will help you decide whether this approach is right for you.

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.”

“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.”

“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 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.

Luis Ouriach is laying down some uncomfortable truths: ​“The issue I have with the even number 4px calculation grid systems is that they can feel a bit loose, either vertically or horizontally. Although this is the de facto standard in product design now, I find myself getting focussing on what feels like a few pixels of extra flab within our components.”

Love this experiment, the proportions in multiple-based systems often feel too close to each other: ​“If I were to try and roll this idea out into a system, I’d probably want to at least try to build in a method to the madness. This is where we can lean on systems like the Fibonacci sequence to handle the heavy lifting.”

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.

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.”

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.”

“We founded Modyfi to build the design platform that multidisciplinary designers deserve. We have known the team at Figma for a while, and have admired what they’ve built for the broader design community, as well as their shared mission to make design more accessible. We believe that together, we can continue to innovate and push the boundaries of what’s possible for designers. As part of this transition, Modyfi will no longer be available after Friday, June 13th.”