Articles

The State of the Designer report explores how designers around the world are upleveling their skills, keeping craft high, and turning new pressures into creative momentum. ​“For some designers, AI’s impact on product design can feel destabilizing, but beneath that uncertainty is an undercurrent of optimism—89% say they’re working faster, and 80% say they’re collaborating better. And despite fears that AI slop might degrade craft and quality, designers are actually finding the opposite to be true: 91% say that new AI tools improve their designs.”

Pablo Stanley: ​“I’m a designer. For years, my world has been Figma, Sketch, Adobe. Nice GUIs with buttons and panels and things I could click. The terminal? That was a black rectangle where the dev team did hacker things. No buttons. No UI. Just a blinking cursor judging you for not knowing what ls ‑la meant. And now? My design tool of choice is the terminal.”

Siddhant Khare: ​“When each task takes less time, you don’t do fewer tasks. You do more tasks. Your capacity appears to expand, so the work expands to fill it. And then some. Your manager sees you shipping faster, so the expectations adjust. You see yourself shipping faster, so your own expectations adjust. The baseline moves. […] This is the paradox: AI reduces the cost of production but increases the cost of coordination, review, and decision-making. And those costs fall entirely on the human.”

Greg Huntoon: ​“Every prompt needs clarity, context, and constraints. I’ve been building my own prompt framework, and this TC-EBC structure — Task, Context, Elements, Behavior, Constraints — has served me well. This kind of structure doesn’t just help you get better results — it’s aligned with what prompt engineers and system designers are converging on across disciplines.”

Praveer Melwani, Figma CFO: ​“Q4 was our best quarter for net new revenue on record, as platform-led adoption across our customer base–including enterprise and international–powered durable growth at scale. We closed the year with 40% year-over-year revenue growth in Q4, an uptick in Net Dollar Retention Rate, and strong cash generation, with a 13% operating cash flow margin. Our healthy balance sheet and positive free cash flow gives us the flexibility to continue investing in AI and the platform while maintaining financial discipline for sustainable, long-term growth.”

Figma’s editorial team revisits the most influential interactions of the last 20 years — alongside stories from designers and builders working now — to see how singular design decisions can grow to define an era, and how the next generation will be shaped by the products we build today.

Rogie King introduces Vectorize, a new AI-powered action in Figma Design and Draw that converts any raster image into fully editable vectors in one click. This feature finally removes the need to use 3rd-party plugins or to redraw assets, while still letting you tweak paths, use color variables, and turn ​“messy” starting points into reusable components.

Meng To shares a concrete end-to-end workflow where OpenClaw runs as a local ​“agency layer” that talks to files, shell, browser, and Telegram, while Codex acts as the focused coding specialist for real repos and multi-task queues. He replaced tools like Notion, Midjourney, Cursor, and v0 with local Markdown files, Nano Banana Pro API, and four specialized Telegram bots to compress a 3‑month and 5–10 person product cycle into about a week while working solo. This setup is powerful but requires non-trivial security setup, careful prompt and reference management, and still leans heavily on code review and system hygiene rather than ​“hands‑off” autonomy.

Brett argues that while Twitter is full of advice to ​“get out of Figma” and learn AI tools, the people actually making money right now are visual designers who doubled down on craft, speed, and positioning rather than trying to vibe‑code products. He frames the explosion of AI and no‑code tools as a demand driver: when thousands of functional products ship every day, the only durable differentiator becomes craft. ​“In a world where everyone can build, the people who can make it beautiful will be the most valuable people in the room.”

Tom Johnson outlines a nine-step AI-heavy design workflow where he starts with messy voice transcripts, uses Claude and tools like Willow, Notion, or Granola to structure the problem, then lets AI generate a deliberately bad but functional app as a scaffold. This matters because it reframes AI’s weakness at UX as a feature: a cheap way to explore directions, expose edge cases, and pressure-test scope before committing to real craft in Figma and a proper engineering handoff.

The AI team of Gather is joining Figma: ​“Second, our AI team is joining Figma. Over the past year, several team members have been exploring new ideas to make work more pleasant and productive, especially for people designing and building software. As we developed these concepts, we had the opportunity to meet the Figma team, and discovered a remarkable alignment in vision and values. We’re thrilled to announce that this group has entered an agreement to join Figma, where they’ll continue pursuing this important work.”

A thoughtful visual essay by Terry Godier on UI patterns migrating from email clients into RSS readers and other apps for consuming content and creating ​“phantom obligation” in the process — guilt about media and tasks no one is actually waiting on you to complete. It matters if you design products or manage your own attention, because unread counts and backlogs manufacture a sense of debt rather than reflect real commitments.

Once your design system is in Figma Make, you can really reap the benefits of working with design and code side by side and start actually using your system. This article walks through the specific technical problems of pulling a design system out of a monorepo to make it accessible in Figma Make.

With the Figma MCP app in Claude, designers, developers, and product managers can now create AI-generated FigJam diagrams.

Ridd shares his mental model for deciding which tools to reach for when coding with AI. Also available as a Dive Club video.

Jakub Krehel shows how he uses AI every day as a design engineer. My process is very similar, but I still picked up a few things!

Nikolas Klein, PM at Figma: ​“Today, we’re introducing the ability to embed Figma Make prototypes into Figma Design, FigJam, and Figma Slides, along with new editing tools that help you build and share your best ideas.”

Joey Banks shares a simple way to get started with variables structure when he is not sure where to begin: ​“One very simple approach that’s worked well for me is separating variables into non-interactive and interactive buckets. […] Non-interactive variables describe the environment. Things like background surfaces, text, icons, and borders that don’t change based on input. Interactive variables describe behavior, such as actions, states, and feedback that do respond to input.”

A collection of essays by Raphael Salaja on interaction design and animations.

Marcin Wichary, Design Architect at Figma, started a microblog about software craft and quality. His writing is always wonderful and insightful — instant subscribe.