Articles

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.”

Greg Huntoon: ​“Every prompt needs clarity, context, and constraints. I’ve been building my own prompt framework, and this TC-EBC structure — Task, Context, Elements, Behavior, Constraints — has served me well. This kind of structure doesn’t just help you get better results — it’s aligned with what prompt engineers and system designers are converging on across disciplines.”

Praveer Melwani, Figma CFO: ​“Q4 was our best quarter for net new revenue on record, as platform-led adoption across our customer base–including enterprise and international–powered durable growth at scale. We closed the year with 40% year-over-year revenue growth in Q4, an uptick in Net Dollar Retention Rate, and strong cash generation, with a 13% operating cash flow margin. Our healthy balance sheet and positive free cash flow gives us the flexibility to continue investing in AI and the platform while maintaining financial discipline for sustainable, long-term growth.”

Figma’s editorial team revisits the most influential interactions of the last 20 years — alongside stories from designers and builders working now — to see how singular design decisions can grow to define an era, and how the next generation will be shaped by the products we build today.

Rogie King introduces Vectorize, a new AI-powered action in Figma Design and Draw that converts any raster image into fully editable vectors in one click. This feature finally removes the need to use 3rd-party plugins or to redraw assets, while still letting you tweak paths, use color variables, and turn ​“messy” starting points into reusable components.

Meng To shares a concrete end-to-end workflow where OpenClaw runs as a local ​“agency layer” that talks to files, shell, browser, and Telegram, while Codex acts as the focused coding specialist for real repos and multi-task queues. He replaced tools like Notion, Midjourney, Cursor, and v0 with local Markdown files, Nano Banana Pro API, and four specialized Telegram bots to compress a 3‑month and 5–10 person product cycle into about a week while working solo. This setup is powerful but requires non-trivial security setup, careful prompt and reference management, and still leans heavily on code review and system hygiene rather than ​“hands‑off” autonomy.

Brett argues that while Twitter is full of advice to ​“get out of Figma” and learn AI tools, the people actually making money right now are visual designers who doubled down on craft, speed, and positioning rather than trying to vibe‑code products. He frames the explosion of AI and no‑code tools as a demand driver: when thousands of functional products ship every day, the only durable differentiator becomes craft. ​“In a world where everyone can build, the people who can make it beautiful will be the most valuable people in the room.”

Tom Johnson outlines a nine-step AI-heavy design workflow where he starts with messy voice transcripts, uses Claude and tools like Willow, Notion, or Granola to structure the problem, then lets AI generate a deliberately bad but functional app as a scaffold. This matters because it reframes AI’s weakness at UX as a feature: a cheap way to explore directions, expose edge cases, and pressure-test scope before committing to real craft in Figma and a proper engineering handoff.

The AI team of Gather is joining Figma: ​“Second, our AI team is joining Figma. Over the past year, several team members have been exploring new ideas to make work more pleasant and productive, especially for people designing and building software. As we developed these concepts, we had the opportunity to meet the Figma team, and discovered a remarkable alignment in vision and values. We’re thrilled to announce that this group has entered an agreement to join Figma, where they’ll continue pursuing this important work.”

A thoughtful visual essay by Terry Godier on UI patterns migrating from email clients into RSS readers and other apps for consuming content and creating ​“phantom obligation” in the process — guilt about media and tasks no one is actually waiting on you to complete. It matters if you design products or manage your own attention, because unread counts and backlogs manufacture a sense of debt rather than reflect real commitments.

Once your design system is in Figma Make, you can really reap the benefits of working with design and code side by side and start actually using your system. This article walks through the specific technical problems of pulling a design system out of a monorepo to make it accessible in Figma Make.

With the Figma MCP app in Claude, designers, developers, and product managers can now create AI-generated FigJam diagrams.