Articles

Stephen Haney is interviewed about the origin story and tech stack behind Paper, one of the most interesting design tools of a new wave. ​“Paper is a browser-based design tool focused on the early, exploratory phase of design. It gives designers a fast, expressive canvas to think visually, experiment freely, and play with things like shaders, gradients, and motion without worrying about handoff or engineering constraints.”

Google’s Gemini team walks through how they use gradients, circles, and motion as a cohesive illustration system to make an unpredictable AI assistant feel legible, calm, and trustworthy. It’s interesting for anyone designing ​“thinking states” or multimodal assistants, because it shows specific visual strategies — directional gradients as energy flow, morphing shapes for cognition, motion tied to user gestures — instead of yet another generic ​“AI glow.”

“When a system is hard to approach, the design must be soft. This softness — conveyed through guided, pulsing gradient shapes, clear language, and transparent signaling — allows users to engage with the new system feeling secure and supported. The gradient can be many things through its animations: aspirational and uplifting, directional and instructional. But they remain soft and direct, and always looking forward; they’re deeply connected to the Google brand with room to grow, like the personified gradient, rippling and responding to voice.”

A new monthly publication for designers: ​“We’re witnessing the birth of a new kind of designer: The AI Designer. Designers who work in evals, prompts, and tool calls. Designers who have as much of a taste for models as they do for fonts. Designers who think in mental models, agents, and intelligence. There’s no textbook for this kind of design (and things change so fast, it wouldn’t make sense to write one). Instead, we need a field guide. A living record of our learnings, tips, tricks, fears, dreams, curiosities, and hot takes.”

The first article — The Rise of the Model Designer — interviews Barron Webster, AI Model Designer at Figma. If you’re curious what that role even means, read on.

“Starting today, the Figma for Jira app supports webhooks, so teams can get instant design status updates like ​“Ready for Dev” directly in Jira tickets, with no admin setup required. Webhook support is enabled for newly linked design files, and we’re rolling it out to existing links soon.”

I’m not into the ​“best of” collections, but Helena Zhang made some truly special and thoughtful picks. Love seeing the new icons for my local Philadelphia Art Museum made it into the list!

Nikita Prokopov published a fantastic, well-researched essay about the state of menu icons in macOS Tahoe: ​“In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that. But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn’t mean users will find what they are looking for faster. And even if the premise was solid, I still wish I could say: they did the best they could, given the goal. But that’s not true either: they did a poor job consistently applying the metaphors and designing the icons themselves.”

Kaari wraps it up: ​”I believe design comes in many flavors. It’s influenced by the person, the domain, the market, the customers. In consumer products, you might need to test ideas quickly because motivations are hard to predict. In B2B or enterprise, you often have more context and can design from that. Some industries require extreme reliability and clarity. The environment matters too. Stakeholders, clients, company culture, and your skills as a designer. If you’re more visual, you lead with visuals. If you’re strong in code, you might use it earlier. […] I want to elevate this discussion above tools, and make sure tools don’t take over the future of design. I don’t want us to needlessly devalue conceptual and divergent thinking just because new tools make execution easier.”

“Our industry is not very patient, and once you start building designs directly to production as the default, the culture and organizational reasons to consider problems, concepts, and intentions start evaporating. We start devaluing the why behind our designs in favor of output.
My worry isn’t the code or the tools themselves. It’s a decline in consideration, and with that, a decline in unique, well-designed products. The question is how we keep that alive even as new tools and technologies emerge.”

MDS pitches in: ​“There is something fundamentally different about freeform exploration versus direct end product manipulation. The same way there’s a big difference between drawing with a pencil on paper, moving objects around on a screen, or writing words in a journal versus typing words on a screen. And now we can have AI do some or all of that for us.”

“So I say let cookie cutter primitives happen. Every font uses the exact same alphabet. Every song uses the same 12 notes. Some people will always want to build something unique regardless of those primitives. […] The idea that everything may become cookie cutter is not an actual problem. It’s a theoretical problem. Meanwhile, there are real problems with real impact waiting to be solved.”

Kaari replies: ​“The ​“make your own things” from generic blocks idea is warm one, and I do appreciate it. Where it starts to lose me is when it tries to force a reality that doesn’t really exist, and it’s not what people do or look for. Look at any craft. The kitchen. The workshop. Purpose-built spaces filled with purpose-built tools, often shaped by centuries of tradition (also sometimes known as experience). Serious craftspeople don’t operate in primitives. A chef doesn’t stock ​“a knife”, ​“a pot”, ​“a carrot”. They have a specific knife, a specific size, a tradition they trust.”

Kaari clarifies his thoughts in an article: ​“I tend to think about design as a search, not a production pipeline. You start with a messy problem. Early on, you do not know the answer. This is why I never fully buy the idea that design is about output. I agree that design is useless without shipping, but the process of designing is not. The design process, and the suffering part of that process, are valuable. […] Use whatever tools you want, but be deliberate about what mode you are in. Protect exploration from premature constraint. Invite constraints when you are ready to learn from them. Use code as feedback, not as a cage.”

On constraints: ​“If you let constraints define the space too early, you do not just get a worse outcome. You lose outcomes that never get discovered.”

On unification: ​“The dream of a coherent universe is compelling. A world where ideas move from chaos to clarity without translation loss. Where designers can build and builders can design. I see the desire, and it can be good. But unification has a shadow side. It can turn into standardization. If everything is built from the same primitives, you get the same patterns repeated across teams. Tools raise the floor, but they can also lower the ceiling if they quietly define what is worth attempting. If the easiest path is always the most conventional path, convention becomes the product.”

“Templates built with Variable modes now work seamlessly when published to Buzz. This gives your marketing teams more flexibility to toggle between your brand modes like colors, campaigns, markets, and more — all while staying on brand. When they open a template published with variables, they’ll see a new Variable switcher in the menu to easily change modes.”

“Admins on Organization and Enterprise plans can now disable ​‘From Figma’ Community templates in Buzz, ensuring teams use only the templates your brand team has published and approved.”

Starting today, websites published from Figma Make and Figma Sites include more metadata for better search and sharing experiences. The improvements include auto-generated site descriptions for Figma Make and support for OpenGraph and X tags for published Figma Make and Sites so they look better on social.

Ridd highlights a few examples from his workflow of delivering production-ready code to his product. Love this part: ​“I explored this concept in Make and really liked where it landed. A couple years ago, I would’ve dropped a Cleanshot .gif on the canvas and asked my developer to recreate it as closely as possible. But I’m no longer making concept cars. This component is the design. Every detail is rooted in code and behaves exactly how I want it to in production.”

Three new AI image editing tools for precise editing and manipulation work — Erase object, Isolate object, and Expand image — and a new toolbar that pairs existing image editing capabilities with these new features. ​“Now, you can lasso any object in an image and use Erase object to remove it completely, or Isolate object to edit or reposition it—without affecting the image background. You can also take a single object or person and apply lighting, color, or focus adjustments. […] Expand image extends the image background to fit new aspect ratios without distortion, preserving the integrity of an image while adapting it to any layout.”

“Use ChatGPT to generate presentations, social posts, invitations, digital ads, posters, and more. The Figma app is available to ChatGPT users on all plans. Support is coming soon for users in the EU.”

Figma introduces a way to track your AI credit usage, and on March 11, 2026, will offer more ways to buy additional AI credits.

Nice improvement to the Cursor Browser, providing a quick way to tweak design. It’s not a replacement for Figma, but a more hands-on way to make changes without prompting or switching to code. Who would think this feature could initiate a big design debate?

“We’re excited to release a visual editor for the Cursor Browser. It brings together your web app, codebase, and powerful visual editing tools, all in the same window. You can drag elements around, inspect components and props directly, and describe changes while pointing and clicking. Now, interfaces in your product are more immediate and intuitive, closing the gap between design and code.”

A lot was written last week about Alan Dye’s departure from Apple as VP of Human Interface Design to lead design at Meta as Chief Design Officer. I shared a few critical pieces about Liquid Glass in the last few months, and thought this story from John Gruber was quite telling: ​“After I published that post, I got a note from a designer friend who left Apple, in frustration, a few years ago. After watching Jobs’s Aqua introduction for the first time in years, he told me, ​“I’m really struck by Steve directly speaking to ​‘radio buttons’ and ​‘the key window’.” He had the feeling that Dye and his team looked down on interface designers who used terms like Jobs himself once used — in a public keynote, no less. That to Dye’s circle, such terms felt too much like ​“programmer talk”. But the history of Apple (and NeXT) user interface design is the opposite. Designers and programmers used to — and still should — speak the exact same language about such concepts. Steve Jobs certainly did, and something feels profoundly broken about that disconnect under Alan Dye’s leadership.”

A really interesting look at modern CSS patterns that 37signals use in Campfire, Writebook, and Fizzy. No Tailwind, no build process, and lots of cutting-edge CSS with good browser support — custom properties (variables), native nesting, container queries, the :has() selector, CSS Layers for managing specificity, color-mix() for dynamic color manipulation, and clamp(), min(), max() for responsive sizing without media queries.