Articles

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.

Dan Saffer makes a clear case that AI doesn’t kill UI — it raises the bar for it. A single chat box won’t cut it, and direct manipulation plus visual affordances make AI legible, accessible, and trustworthy.

A set of resources for upskilling from one of the ​“traditional” digital design roles (UI, UX, Service) towards becoming AI aware, and on to become an AI designer.

Zeh Fernandes revisits David Krakauer’s ​“complementary vs. competitive” framework — think abacus vs. calculator, GPS as a skill-eroder — and argues that AI tools should teach as well as do. ​”Often, we don’t want to be better navigators, or our use of math is so trivial it doesn’t justify constant practice. And that’s fine. So long as it’s a deliberate choice. But in digital product design, the emphasis tends to fall on outcomes alone: getting the job done, removing friction, making everything feel effortless. In the short term, we gain speed. Over time, though, we risk dulling the very skills we once actively cultivated.”

A behind-the-scenes look at how Figma’s product icons come together: Tim Van Damme shares guidelines (one pixel strokes, rounded caps, consistent and balanced sizes) and iterations it takes to make the whole suite feel like a family. Love the idea of rating confidence: ​“Tim frequently solicits feedback from product designers and product managers, guiding the conversation with a one-to-five star rating to show how confident he is in a design.”

“Organization admins at companies using Governance+ for Figma Enterprise can now prevent users with view-only access from copying, saving, or exporting files. These controls can be applied to guest viewers or to all viewers, and can be configured at the organization or workspace level to align with your data-sharing policies.”

Bloomberg: ​“Figma may ultimately be able to secure a valuation multiple of more than 20 times its annual revenue, said Matt Kennedy, Renaissance Capital’s senior strategist. With 13 million monthly active users, Figma generated $821 million of revenue in the 12 months ended March 31 and would top $1 billion of annual revenue this year at its current growth rate.”

Figma Sites now supports apex (top-level, like exam​ple​.com) domains and custom subdomains (like yourname.figma.site) so that you have more options for personalizing your URL.

Jenny Wen, previously a Director of Design at Figma and now a design lead at Anthropic: ​“The way I’ve seen great work made isn’t using any sort of design process. It’s skipping steps when we deem them unnecessary. It’s doing them out of order just for the heck of it. It’s backtracking when we’re unsatisfied. It’s changing things after we’ve handed off the design. It’s starting from the solution first. It’s operating on vibes and intuition. It’s making something just for the sake of making people smile. It’s a feeling that we nailed it. It’s knowing how to bend the process in your favor. It’s the sense to know how to keep making your work better. And it’s a clear, unwavering ideal of what good looks like.”

Ridd recorded an entire new video influenced by her article.

Eric Bailey: ​“Like cicadas emerging from the ground, design industry conversations about quality seem to periodically erupt on social media. Also like cicadas, these articles are as predictable as they are irritating.”