Articles

Admins on the Enterprise plan can now require password protection for all published Sites & Makes across your organization.

Design Engineer Carmen Ansio on the change coming to translating visual ideas into solid code: ​“We’re on the edge of a massive shift, thanks to three things coming together: smart design systems in Figma, an AI-native code editor called Cursor, and a data bridge called the Model Context Protocol (MCP). We’re not just translating pictures anymore. We’re building machine-readable systems that an AI can understand and build from directly. This guide is for you, the person on the ground, showing you not just how to use this new workflow, but how to think about it.”

I rarely wear clothes with prints, except for Figma’s swag. This article looks at a greater phenomenon of corporate attire: ​”Whether it’s a coveted Power Mac G4 Cube T‑shirt or a current Figma style, software is trending. One might call it ​“corpcore”: a sensibility that both revels in the iconic software logos of yore while celebrating the tech companies that touch a nerve today. People are increasingly repping apps on tote bags, hats, and water bottles in the same way they might wear a band T‑shirt or sports jersey.”

Design Manager Jonas Downey shares tips he learned for building resilient design teams at Figma, Twitter, and 37signals: start with team health, encourage experimentation and shifting roles, treat craft as a differentiator, build bridges across the org, be judicious about process, scale with intention, and make time for levity. ​”Adaptability doesn’t happen by accident—it’s a product of intentional leadership, express permission, and encouraging people to continually push the boundaries of what’s possible. And sometimes it takes a bit of trial and error to get right.”

Emil Kowalski helps decide when and how to animate to provide a better user experience, starting with ensuring your animations have a purpose. I finished Emil’s course Animations on the Web this summer and highly recommend following his writing on motion and animation.

“Now you can access millions of high-quality stock images from Unsplash directly in Figma Buzz. Just open the left sidebar and click on the media panel to explore a feed of beautiful images for inspiration or use the search bar to quickly find exactly what you need.”

A calligraphy artist Jake Rainis shares an interesting technique to improve your Bezier curves: ​“Plot your anchors as you normally would, but when you pull the Bezier handles to create curves, pull them at either a 0º angle (horizontal), or 90º angle (vertical).”

Matt Wierzbicki shows how to turn Figma designs made with shadcn/​ui into production‑ready code by setting up Cursor to use shadcn/​ui and Figma MCPs.

Jakub built oklch.fyi and published a short intro to OkLCH: why perceptual uniformity makes palette-building easier, how to keep shades consistent, what to expect from gradients, practical notes on sRGB vs. Display-P3, and the state of browser support and CSS fallback. See Hacker News comments for an in-depth discussion.

Dan Hollick is writing Making Software, ​“a reference manual for people who design and build software.“ I’ve always admired the depth he goes to while researching and explaining complex concepts. In this new chapter, he answers every question you’ve ever had about digital color.

The San Francisco Standard visited the Figma office during the Maker Week to see if the company is up for the challenge of ​“retaining the company’s playful, eccentric culture without succumbing to the pressures of the public market.”

President Donald Trump: ​“America has long led the world in innovation, technological advancement, and design. But with a sprawling ecosystem of digital services offered to Americans, the Government has lagged behind in usability and aesthetics. There is a high financial cost to maintaining legacy systems, to say nothing of the cost in time lost by the American public trying to navigate them. It is time to fill the digital potholes across our Nation.”

Bloomberg: ​“President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday creating a new post for the government’s chief design officer and is tapping Airbnb Inc. co-founder Joe Gebbia to fill the position, according to people familiar with the matter. […] His mission as the nation’s first chief design officer will be to ​“prioritize improving websites and physical sites that have a major impact on Americans’ everyday lives,” according to the text of the executive order released by the White House. That mandate could include income tax filings, Social Security applications, Medicare enrollment, immigration services, and other high-volume government services.”

It’s incredible to see design being recognized at such a high level, and one of the nation’s top design founders instead of a career bureaucrat being tapped to fill this role. The fact that the United States of America created a new post for its first CDO the same day as the design software company at the forefront of the tech industry shows how early it still is for design leadership.

Maggie Appleton argues today’s chatbots drift toward sycophancy — undercutting Enlightenment habits of skeptical, reader-engaging discourse — and suggests giving users explicit ​“critique modes,” routing to tougher personas, and training methods beyond RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback) so assistants challenge us, not flatter us.

A useful checklist for Buzz templates: start in Figma Design, lean on Auto Layout, keep text layers separate for Bulk create, lock image ratios, name layers, use variants, test the template as a user, and share with context. Great reference for keeping self-serve assets on brand.

“Mike Krieger, Chief Product Officer (CPO) of Anthropic, and Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, are joining Figma’s board of directors. Mike and Luis are visionary leaders who have built and shaped products used by billions of people around the world every day. We’re so excited to welcome them to the Figma board.”

“We’re introducing a series of new features that remove barriers for keyboard-only designers across most Figma products. Users can now pan the canvas, insert objects, and make precise selections quickly and easily. And, with improved screen reader support, these actions are read aloud as users work, making it easier to stay oriented.”

Ana Boyer: ​“Just as design systems help design and engineering teams understand brand guidelines, best practices, patterns, and code, they give AI agents the context they need to produce not just any output, but the right output. And when AI agents can build with your design context, they create a flywheel effect: AI strengthens your design system, which powers better AI code generation.”

Great analogy: ​“Asking an AI agent to generate code without design system context is like asking a new engineer to start shipping code before onboarding. It might technically work—but it won’t align with how your team actually builds.”

Steven Levy at WIRED: ​“He (Dylan Field) explains that in the early 2000s, design was about making things pretty. By the 2010s, people were emulating Steve Jobs’ philosophy that design was about function. Now, Field says, design is not only both those things, but our means of communication—who you are, what your brand stands for, how you engage with the public. Our world is built on software, Field says, and the more software is created, the more design becomes the core differentiator.”

Read Dylan Field’s founder letter about why design is more important than ever, and what’s next for the company.