Design Thursday #100
A weekly recap of everything you need to know about tools, events, guidelines and design in general.
We did it, we reached edition 100! From big achievements like bringing people back to orbit the moon this week, to tiny ones like this one, it's worth celebrating. For this milestone edition, before we start the next 100, we wanted to keep things familiar while preparing for what comes next. So look out for something new in the coming weeks.
Now let's dive into this week's updates:
Figma Updates
On-canvas video playback
Videos in Figma Design and Figma Draw now have playback controls directly on the canvas. Play, pause, full screen, playback speed, and sound, just like you are used to in FigJam and Slides. It's Rolling out this week.
Make Kits
Make Kits let design system teams bring their actual system into Figma Make. You can import public or private npm packages, library styles, variables, and tokens, and publish the kit across your organization. Make can now build with your real components instead of just placeholders.
Attachments in Figma Make
You can now attach files directly to any Make prompt, either as context or as actual content. Supported formats include PDF, Markdown, TSX, JS, CSS, CSV, JSON, images, video, and SVGs. So no more manually copying things in.
Read more about Figma Make attachments
Built-in Approvals in Figma Buzz
Teams can now request and grant approvals directly inside Buzz before exporting. Admins can choose whether review is optional or required.
Learn more about approvals in Buzz
Sketch Dublin (2026.1)
Sketch's first major 2026 update adds a long list of new features. Here are some highlights:
- Selection colors: adjust a color across your entire multi-layer selection at once. Hovering highlights which layers use it.
- Independent borders: set borders per side on rectangles and frames, with a new option to center dashes neatly on corners. Advanced border settings now apply to text layers too.
- Corner smoothing controls: a new panel with a "Max" option that keeps corners fully rounded regardless of size. It also works on combined shapes with boolean operations.
- Rebuilt eyedropper: picks Color Variables directly from fills, borders, gradients, and text. Just hold Shift to apply the variable instead of the hex value.
But there is a lot more including over 150+ improvements, so have a look at Sketch's changelog to go through all updates.
See the full Sketch Dublin changelog
Webflow Updates
Markdown for AI agents
Webflow now automatically converts your site's HTML to Markdown for LLM requests, you can toggle this off if you don't want it. As AI agents browse the web more, this makes sure your content is delivered in the right format.
Read more about Markdown for agents
Single-page publishing
Enterprise teams can now publish a single page without triggering a full site publish. Select "This page" in the publish panel so only that page goes live. If there are any global changes, they will be flagged so nothing unexpected gets published.
Read more about single-page publishing
Framer Holo Shader
Framer added a new shader: Holo. It simulates how light splits into rainbow colors on holographic surfaces. Instead of picking colors directly, you control the math that shapes them and how the shader flows.
Stark Updates
Stark brought quite some updates this week, here's a short overview:
- Auto-annotations now cover VoiceOver, TalkBack, and ARIA notes, using the same AI as Focus Order and Landmarks
- Storybook addon has a new CLI that builds your Storybook. It scans each story, and sends results to back Stark
- In the Governance page you can now set WCAG version, conformance level, minimum font size, and voice and tone for alt-text suggestions
- Stark MCP has expanded with Streamable HTTP support and now has the ability to pull violations per project
LottieFiles Figma State Machine
The LottieFiles Figma plugin can now read your existing prototype interactions and export them as a dotLottie file with embedded state machines. It supports triggers for click, hover, press, mouse enter/leave, and after delay. There's an in-plugin preview so you can test it before exporting. So the prototype you've built before can now be automatically be transformed in an interactive animation.
Read more about Figma State Machine
Pencil Updates
Pencil added presentation mode, so you can showcase your design better than just scrolling the canvas. You can generate slides and export them as PDF or present them directly inside Pencil. There also have been some improvements for Figma import.
FlutterFlow Designer Beta
FlutterFlow Designer expanded its Designer beta (a tool to design with AI) with:
- Agent integrations: Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, and Cursor
- Native agent mode and voice mode
- Component Studio and Style Explorer
- Import and paste designs to and from FlutterFlow
AI and Emotion: When AI acts emotional
Anthropic published research on how Claude uses emotion concepts. Models can develop internal representations that function like emotions, learned from training text, and those representations influence behavior. It showcases how Claude answers, writes code, and makes decisions. Just a good way to understand AI tooling you use day-to-day better.
Maze AI Moderator
Maze expanded its AI moderator with a fewnew featuers:
- Visual stimulus testing: participants react to a design while the AI probes their reasoning in real time
- Flexible discussion styles: freeform, structured, or a mix in a single session
- Screen-sharing: send participants to any live site or prototype and hear how they navigate it
Interviews & Talks
Ian Silber on designing at OpenAI
On of the latest Dive Club interviews was with Ian Silber, Head of Product Design at OpenAI. They went over what makes the design culture there unique, designing around chat as a primitive, the vision for a dynamic interface library, and how tools like Codex are changing design practice.
Ben Blumenrose on how 50+ design teams are using AI
Ben Blumenrose runs Designer Fund, giving him a portfolio-wide view of AI adoption. In this interview he explains what AI fluency actually looks like in practice, the emerging AI ops role, how the T-shaped designer is evolving, and what evaluating AI skills in hiring looks like right now.
Marvin Schwaibold on Shopify's new design studio
Shopify recently acquired Molly Studio to build their new Product Design Studio. In another Dive Club interview Marvin Schwaibold talked about creativity, how AI unlocks design work at Shopify, what design differentiation looks like there, diving into Claude Code, and building internal tools.