Articles

Raluca Budiu from Nielsen Norman Group with a sobering critique of Apple’s new visual language: ​“iOS 26 brings Liquid Glass controls laid over noisy backgrounds, jittery animated buttons, shrunken and crowded tab bars, collapsing navigation, and ubiquitous search bars. On top of that, it breaks long‑established iOS conventions, getting closer to Android design. Overall, Apple is prioritizing spectacle over usability.”

On transparency: ​“One of the oldest findings in usability is that anything placed on top of something else becomes harder to see. Yet here we are, in 2025, with Apple proudly obscuring text, icons, and controls by making them transparent and placing them on top of busy backgrounds.”

On animations: ​“Our eyes are finely tuned to detect motion, which is why animated buttons grab attention instantly. But delight turns into distraction on the tenth, twentieth, or hundredth time. […] It’s like the interface is shouting ​“look at me” when it should quietly step aside and let the real star — the content — take the spotlight. […] Motion for motion’s sake is not usability. It’s distraction with a side of nausea.”

I was looking forward to this update since WWDC, but it left me increasingly annoyed and disappointed. From hidden actions in Safari to blurred content with jittery transitions in Mail, everyday experiences require more attention and extra steps on my part without giving anything in return. Liquid Glass feels like an ultimate departure from Steve Jobs’ ​“design is not just what it looks like and feels like, design is how it works” motto.

“Rolling out to Enterprise plans over the next few weeks, Organization admins can now enable or disable AI features for individual workspaces. When toggled on, AI functionality will be available in all files within that workspace.”

Jake Cooper: ​“When something is labored on, obsessed over, etc, it has no choice but to become of quality, because we give a part of ourselves to it.” This, also: ​“We must choose to build quality things. They will take longer, more work, but in return we will be able to enjoy a life full of rich tastes and experiences.”

Emil Kowalski shares seven simple ideas you can use to improve your animations: scale your buttons, don’t animate from scale(0), don’t delay subsequent tooltips, choose the right easing, make your animations origin-aware, keep animations fast, and use blur when nothing else works. 

Nikolas Klein, PM at Figma: ​“Now you can copy any design from a Figma Make preview to the design canvas, allowing you to edit, iterate, and take your ideas further.” To make this possible, Figma purchased the technology behind a popular html.to.design plugin from my friends at <div>RIOTS. As part of this partnership, they will keep building and maintaining their plugins and tools independently, including html.to.design.

Thomas Lowry, Director of Advocacy at Figma, shares three best practices for designers to give developers—and the AI agents they use—the context they need to go from design to production.

Kris Rasmussen, CTO of Figma: ​“Today we’re announcing updates to the Figma MCP server and Code Connect that make it possible to bring Figma design context anywhere you work—whether it’s in your IDE, your AI agent, or your prototypes. These updates make your design context—context about how your design system is structured, how your codebase is written, and how your team builds products—more portable and powerful, helping you move from idea to product with less friction.”

This update includes three major releases. Remote access to the Figma MCP server from your IDE, an AI coding agent, or a browser-based model. Bring the underlying code from a Figma Make file to your codebase using the Figma MCP server. Code Connect’s new in-app mapping experience lets you browse components inside Figma, map them to the right code and file, and see which are linked or missing.

“Now you can use the Figma integration with Zapier to connect Figma to thousands of other tools without writing code. The integration helps teams stay focused on building great products by automating routine tasks, like sending notifications when files are updated, logging design feedback, and creating tickets for follow up tasks.”

Figma rebuilt its renderer on WebGPU, detailing the engineering work in this article: compute-shader opportunities, clearer error handling, and lower CPU overhead (with plans for RenderBundles/​MSAA), plus how the team rolled it out safely with device blocklists and mid-session fallback.

“Explore ideas and riff on product flows with templates in Figma Make. Create an accurate representation of an existing product experience, then replicate it as a sandbox to experiment with design directions, new feature ideas, growth campaigns, and more.”

“For years, the boundaries between product development roles have become less defined. Our latest report quantifies this shift and explores what it means for you and your team.”

“Figma shares plunged 14% in extended trading on Wednesday after the design software company reported results for the first time since its initial public offering in July. Revenue increased 41% year over year in the second quarter from $177.2 million a year earlier, Figma said in a statement. […] The company sees between $88 million and $98 million in adjusted operating income for the full year and a little more than $1.02 billion in revenue.”
 

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.