Articles

“Spectrum, Adobe’s design system, already had a robust icon system, but the time had come for a redesign. Evolving a design system’s icons can involve updating and/​or redesigning assets, improving how icons are maintained and served to the teams using them, and creating a solution for adding, updating, and deprecating design elements within it. Months of discovery, exploration, reviews, and sharing laid the groundwork for the icon team’s three-phase process. It began with extensive design exploration and beta testing to confirm the needs of product teams, and ended with implementing suggestions for improving search, customization, and serving icons. It’s a method of inquiry, feedback, and refinement that other teams can apply to their work.”

Kate Moran from Nielsen Norman Group demonstrates how to get better results from generative AI chatbots by writing ​“CAREful” prompts. Use the acronym CARE (context, ask, rules, and examples) to remember what information to give AI tools to achieve your desired results: include context, what you’re asking the system to do, rules for how to do it, and examples of what you want.

Ridd on two big issues and two opportunities of designing with AI: ​“If I’m in my design tool it’s because something is in my brain (even if it’s just a simple sketch). That’s why I don’t buy the so-called ​“blank canvas problem” as a real pain point for professional designers. Pointing AI at this ​“problem” is really a way to expand the user base by lowering the bar for non-designers to participate.”

Christopher Butler wrote an essay on how details, focus, time, and taste elevate craft. ​“Attention to detail is not a personality trait; it is a manifestation of a preference for order and consistency. When that preference is fundamental, it makes it nearly impossible for a person to not see mistakes, flaws, inconsistencies, or differences. […] This is why attention to detail cannot (easily) be taught. Teaching a person to ​“see detail” requires them to care about and prefer certain forms of order.”

I’m always curious about how Figma’s engineering team operates at scale: ​“Migrating onto Kubernetes can take years. Here’s why we decided it was worth undertaking, and how we moved a majority of our core services in less than 12 months, all while making our compute platform easier to use.”

Vitaly Friedman from Smashing Magazine offers a few helpful templates, real-world applications, and insights on the importance of mapping both successful and unsuccessful touchpoints of user journeys to visualize the user experience.

Explaining systems thinking applied to design systems through an off-road vehicle platform? That’s my jam. ​“Nissan has developed a vehicle platform that gives it flexibility across a wide selection of vehicles. They leverage the same base component (the frame), and attached different components to that base in order to achieve the desired design. When building a design system, we should strive for a similar level of structure and flexibility. This gives us consistency while also allowing us to be adaptive and scale to our user’s needs.”

In-person attendees of Config 2024 received Issue 2 of The Prompt, a print magazine by Figma’s Story Studio and Brand Studio. A digital version is now available on the blog. ​“Featuring leaders working across design, engineering, product development, and the built environment, this collection of essays and interviews takes on questions about how AI might shape the way we create.”

After giving Slides a good try, Raquel Piqueras shares a few things she has been missing — a simple timer, access to sharing settings from the open presentation, slide-level components, and hotkeys to streamline the work.

Rauno from Vercel wrote a fantastic article with over 20 visual examples of using depth for design, animation, and interaction.

Bloomberg: ​“An investor group including Coatue Management, Alkeon Capital Management and General Catalyst Partners have invested in Figma Inc. as part of a deal that values the design startup at $12.5 billion, according to people with knowledge of the matter. ¶ The deal comes as the San Francisco-based company is delivering annual recurring revenue of more than $700 million, a figure that is projected to surpass $1 billion by next year, one of the people said, asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public. Yearly recurring revenue stood at about $400 million in late 2022.”

A retrospective on an issue with Make Designs from Noah Levin, a VP of Design at Figma. First, a reminder on how the feature works: “[…] Make Designs feature employs three parts: a model, some context, and a prompt. This feature currently uses a collection of off-the-shelf models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Amazon’s Titan model—the same generally available models that anyone can use—and we have not done any additional training or fine-tuning. To give the model enough freedom to compose designs from a wide variety of domains, we commissioned two extensive design systems (one for mobile and one for desktop) with hundreds of components, as well as examples of different ways these components can be assembled to guide the output.”

What went wrong: ​“We carefully reviewed the underlying design systems throughout the course of development and during a private beta. But in the week leading up to Config, new components and example screens were added that we simply didn’t vet carefully enough. A few of those assets were similar to aspects of real world applications, and appeared in the output of the feature with certain prompts.”

Ridd noticed that designers who can code spend more time sketching their ideas and less time in Figma. This approach isn’t common because it still takes too long to code designs, but AI will change that. What if instead of generating polished mockups from text prompts we used AI to turn wireframes into frontend code, applied our design system, and tweaked the visual direction based on the provided mood board? (This is just one of the ideas explored in the new section of Dive.) 

Benji Taylor on creating guiding principles and designing interactions for the Family crypto wallet app: ​“This is not a technical post or tutorial. There are many good resources about how to craft smooth animations or design pixel perfect UI, by people much smarter than I am. This is about how we made something complex feel welcoming. It’s about what makes Family feel familiar.”

It’s Nice That talks to Damien Correll, Figma’s creative director, and Jessica Svendsen, its design manager, about designing the identity for this year’s Config and the response from the community. ​“The visual identity that goes alongside Config is a ten-month design project completed mainly internally, this year with help from Danish design team Relay on the motion front. Extending Figma’s core shape-based language with transforming glyphs, the branding is colourful, clean and much-hyped.”

See also Crafting the visual identity for Config 2024 at Figma blog.

I don’t use Affinity apps day-to-day, but I bought a license a while ago (a glorious one-time fee!) and use it whenever I need to do something for print, convert a tricky vector from EPS, or edit a photo. It won’t replace Figma for me, but it filled a void that Adobe Creative Cloud left. They were acquired by Canva earlier this year and currently run a promotion offering a six-month free trial and 50% off all perpetual licenses ($82.99 for all apps on all platforms). Worth giving a try!

Abdus Salam, Product Designer at Meta, writes at UX Collective: ​“The future belongs to designers who can master AI, not be mastered by it. Our value lies not just in our technical skills, but in our creativity, our empathy, and our ability to wield these tools in service of crafting experiences that resonate on a profoundly human level.” Also: ​“while AI can help us reach ​“good”, achieving ​“great” still requires human ingenuity and an unwavering commitment to quality.”

Mia Blume from Designing with AI with a controversial take: ​“In fact, I think Figma AI changes nothing for design. […] Besides the immediately useful feature of smart naming, Figma AI doesn’t alter the existing trajectory. This isn’t a dig on Figma, or its role in the future of tooling. It’s more that as a discipline, we were already ​“here”—some people just didn’t realize it.” If you’ve been paying attention to AI-related links in this newsletter, you would agree with her points.

Bingo: ​“The real weakness that jeopardizes our field has existed long before the invention of generative AI tools for creatives. If our value (even if it’s only perceived) lies solely in drawing boxes, then we will inevitably become obsolete. And if we remain focused on the wrong things, we will miss the moment in which we could do something about it.” In the end, she suggests three key areas that design leaders can focus on.

Jay Peters from The Verge spoke to Kris Rasmussen about the issue. ​“We’re doing a pass over the bespoke design system to ensure that it has sufficient variation and meets our quality standards. That’s the root cause of the issue. But we’re going to take additional precautions before we re-enable [Make Designs] to make sure that the entire feature meets our quality standards and is consistent with our values.”

David Hoang on three topics he is thinking a lot about after this year’s Config.