Articles

Kevin Muldoon traces the ​“humans can see between 1 and 10 million colors” claim to its source, and finds it’s an 80-year-old shrug repeated without verification. Designers cite this number constantly; the actual answer is more complicated and more interesting.

The Not Boring Software founder’s five-year reflection on rejecting the venture script in favor of slow success: ​“Slow success means you get to stick with an idea long enough for it to get interesting. Interesting work takes time. Many artists spend their entire life exploring a single technique or topic. Deeper work leads you to deeper meaning leads you to deeper fulfillment.”

Yann-Edern Gillet, design engineer at Linear, revisits his ​“Rosetta Stone” metaphor for design engineering translation through the lens of AI. The central argument: when translation is cheap and instantaneous, the bottleneck shifts from execution to meaning — and the new craft is preserving intent while everything accelerates.

An upcoming interactive exhibit restoring the design moments that shaped software history, from Xerox Alto’s Smalltalk-76 interface to the original ​“slide to unlock” on iPhone. Each restoration requires reverse-engineering details, motion, and behavior from low-quality assets.

Martin Rariga, Founding Product Designer at Equals, breaks down a practical AI-powered design engineering stack: Claude Code for big refactors and complex builds, Cursor for precise edits, and Figma (via MCP) to reference the new design direction while restyling.

Yarden Katz, Product Manager at Figma, walks through the bidirectional workflow between Codex and Figma’s MCP server. The design-to-code direction is the expected one — copy a Figma frame link, paste it into Codex, and the get_​design_​context tool extracts layouts, styles, and components to implement against. The more interesting direction is code-to-canvas: Codex can capture a live running UI and push it back into Figma as editable frames, letting the design side iterate before syncing changes back to code.

Five practical strategies for integrating Slots into a design system, sourced from teams who’ve been testing the feature since Schema 2025. The most actionable tip is to start with the components people detach the most — that’s where Slots will deliver the fastest payoff. I also liked the tip of using pre-filled slots where content is predictable, and empty slots where designers need to add something on their own.

Patrick Morgan makes a clean distinction that vibe-coding discourse keeps blurring: prototype code is for exploration, production code is for endurance. He is building a protected prototyping environment using Claude Code, a place where his team can move fast and then deliberately port the right assets across the boundary into production.

There is a clear parallel with how the design team at Notion works. In the recent episode of How I AI, Brian Lovin showed their collaborative ​“prototype playground,” where the entire team can create, share, and iterate on functional prototypes.

That also reminded me of how my team worked a decade ago, back when front-end development was a tad simpler. We had a separate ​“mockups” directory inside the Rails monorepo, where designers prepared static HTML mockups with production-ready CSS and JS. By the time designs were handed off to engineers in a feature branch, all polish and design details were already baked in. The design team must be fairly technical, but there is no going back to handing off Figma files after working this way.

The new Workflow Lab format, showing an end-to-end process, is a smart way to frame the new AI image tools in context. The three new tools (erase object, isolate object, expand image) are genuinely useful for anyone who’s had to leave Figma to do basic cleanup in Photoshop, and Vectorize finally removes a step that’s been a quiet annoyance for years.

A first look at Config 2026 speakers — AI artist Holly Herndon, creator of the world’s first 3D-printed fashion collection Danit Pele, designer and author Vicki Tan, designer and founder Matthew Ström-Aw, and mathematician and educator Grant Sanderson from 3Blue1Brown. Config returns to San Francisco on June 23–25. Virtual registration is free.

Figma explains how its new MCP server lets Codex generate Figma Design files from live code and, in the other direction, use Figma frames as structured context for agentic code generation.

In the previous issue, I wrote about the interior and UI of Ferrari Luce. Raja Vijayaraman was inspired by a temperature knob and rebuilt it for a touch screen. Really nicely done.

Andrew Hogan: ​“In the AI era, companies need designers more than ever. In fact, our latest study suggests that AI is actually driving renewed momentum in design hiring. We unpack why that is, what hiring managers are prioritizing, and which skills designers need to get ahead.”

To follow up, watch Understanding Today’s Design Job Market, where Andrew speaks with Daniel Wert, CEO of Wert & Co., about this study and what it reveals about the current moment in the market. Together, they unpack the rebound in design hiring, the surge in demand for senior ICs, and the state of junior hiring. Daniel shares what he’s seeing firsthand from running design leadership searches across industries — and where companies may be thinking too short-term.

From design system documentation and PRDs to user research and feedback, Make can now pull in context from across your product ecosystem. Figma added new featured connectors for Amplitude, Box, Dovetail, Granola, Marvin, and zeroheight. You can also connect Make to any remote MCP server by setting up a custom connector.

Once you’ve installed and authorized a Make connector, just hit @ in your Make file and start typing the connector name to pull external context directly into your prototype.

Joey Banks: “…trying Figma Console MCP has completely opened my eyes into what I can offload. Not because it replaces the enjoyable work that I was doing before, but because it handled some of the longer, more repetitive tasks so quickly, and actually so well. Creating 200+ variables took seconds, and mapping them to color swatch instances so the team could preview values was way easier than I expected.”

Alex Barashkov is disappointed by this release, and I have to agree with some of his points. I spend more time in Cursor than Figma lately, and returning to a workspace without AI agents is always hard. In the most recent and relevant example, after importing a few screens from code to Figma, I had to manually replace fonts (no ​“Selection fonts” for bulk edits, so first had to test a few plugins) and colors (a bit easier but still cumbersome), then abstract repetitive elements into components. While doing this, I kept asking myself why I have to waste time on this when bots can do it in minutes.

“Bringing Claude Code workflows directly into Figma lets developers, designers, and even hobbyists capture a real, functioning UI from a browser — in production, staging, or localhost — and convert it into editable frames on the Figma canvas. Code is powerful for converging — running a build, clicking a path, and arriving at one state at a time. The canvas is powerful for diverging — laying out the full experience, seeing the branches, and shaping direction collectively. Going from code to canvas helps teams move fluidly, so work can narrow when it needs to and open up when it’s time to collaborate.”

My guess is it’s based on the html.to.design technology that Figma acquired last year, which is a huge time saver and an essential part of my toolkit. I haven’t tested Claude Code to Figma yet, but the result in demos looks very similar to what I usually get from the plugin. Which makes me wonder why they limited it to Claude Code instead of making something like a universal ​“Send to Figma” browser extension?

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.”