Articles

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. 

Great piece by Laura Escobar on what it’s like to be a founding designer: ​“Ship. Ship like your life depends on it. Because, for the life of the business, it depends on it. And to ship the right bets, you have to step away from just looking at pixels to understand what needs to get built and why.”

Also, this: ​“This doesn’t happen in isolation, which is why influence is the best design tool. Your job isn’t designing features. Your job at a startup is about staying alive. Treading water until a boat floats by, and then figuring out how to build a boat that matches the boat that floats by.”

Fast Company spoke with Figma’s head of AI, David Kossnick, about what the company has accomplished so far, where he’s trying to steer it, and why the tech industry needs to move past prompting and create experiences that are ​“more visual, more exploratory.”

Reuters: ​“Design software company Figma was hit with a proposed class action in California federal court on Friday for allegedly misusing its customers’ designs to train artificial intelligence models. The lawsuit said the company used its customers’ data and intellectual property without permission to train its generative AI tools, which according to the complaint led to San Francisco-based Figma’s ​“sky-high valuation” in a $1.2 billion initial public offering earlier this year.”

Loredana Crisan, Chief Design Officer at Figma, introduces Gemini 3 Pro as a new experimental model in Figma Make.

Connect external tools to Make to pull in PRDs, tickets, and product documents, so you can create prototypes with full context. Update your connected docs or create tasks directly from Make to keep everything in sync. Supported connectors: Asana, Atlassian (Confluence, Jira), GitHub, Linear, mon​day​.com, and Notion.

Molly suggests using separate color palettes for marketing and product design, as they have different goals and speed of iteration.

Noah Levin, VP of Design at Figma, shows how creative image prompting with the new Nano Banana Pro model can add serious value to your work across all of Figma’s products. I really liked the practicality of examples in this article, from updating a headshot to match the rest of the team to preparing a dark version of the illustration.

Max Woolf ran experiments with image generation models and was really impressed with Nano Banana 2.5 — note that this blog post was published before Google introduced the new Pro version. ​“After running Nano Banana through its paces with my comically complex prompts, I can confirm that thanks to Nano Banana’s robust text encoder, it has such extremely strong prompt adherence that Google has understated how well it works.”

Yann-Edern Gillet adopted his original talk at Granola’s Design Engineering Night into an article: ​“The real Rosetta Stone didn’t solve languages, it overlapped them. Same meaning, carved three times, so people could decode one through the other. Design engineering is the same: we’re constantly trying to express intent twice — once visually, once in code, without losing the meaning in between. When the languages don’t match, the wall gets thick. When they overlap, the wall becomes translucent. And when the overlap is high enough… the wall disappears. It becomes glass. I think that overlap, that shared percentage of language, is the real definition of velocity.”