Design Thursday #59
A weekly recap of everything you need to know about tools, events, guidelines and design in general.
Figma's Big Five
Lets get the biggest announcement out of the way first. Figma announced 5 big new features, coming and some already available in Figma.
- Grids: you can now make even more advanced auto layouts with support for grids. Elements will automatically adapt to your grid size and you can customize it to span over multiple columns or rows.
- Figma Sites: A brand new site builder that starts from your Figma design. In a matter of minutes you can publish a fully responsive website. Including built in interactions like hover effects, custom cursors, scroll animations, marquees, ... In a future version there will also be support for custom code components, an AI builder and CMS.
- Figma Make: An AI powered app builder (similar to tools like Lovable or Vercel's V0) that allows you to bring your design to live even more. This is great for prototyping or getting a head-start on development. What makes Figma's version great is that you copy+paste an existing design as part of your prompt which is much more powerful than using an image, as it knows your layer structure, can use vector elements and exact variables. Make is rolling out in beta over the coming weeks.
- Figma Buzz: A new interface mode mostly geared towards marketeers, it allows them to change the content of existing templates for social media, print, ... without the need to learn everything about Figma and worse, messing up the template. This is free to use for everyone for the rest of the year, but starting next year, a new Content Editor plan will be added to Figma for this.
- Figma Draw: A more advanced vector editing mode within Figma that lets you apply brushes to strokes, add different effects to your illustrations, apply patterns, a lasso tool, shape builder, and more.... In a world full of AI images, this is a great way to bring a more human touch to your designs.
Grids, Sites, Buzz and Draw is now available in beta, with Make coming soon. All of this is free for the rest of 2025, additional costs could/will come next year for some of these new features. Check out Config's opening keynote to get a full overview of all the announcements, or join one of the deep dives at Config later today.
New in Webflow
Webflow introduced some smaller features that improve your way of working and some bigger ones that can transform how you build web platforms. Lets start with the smaller ones:
- Use assets as Open Graph images: previously you had to upload an asset, figure out what the URL was and pasting it in the page settings. And possibly deleting the image if you've forgotten it was used as OG image. No more! You can now select images directly from the assets.
- Comment on CMS items: it was already possible to leave comments on any part of the webpage as a great way of giving feedback to your team, but now you can also leave feedback on CMS items. Is a title of a blogpost not right or you found a typo? By selecting the "Only on this CMS item" toggle it will only be applied to the CMS item and not the page template.
- Custom code in site previews: If you've ever written custom code on a Webflow page to add some more advance interaction or integration with a third-party, you know the pain of publishing the page, hoping everything goes well, only to find out you need to change something and go through the publishing process again. This should no longer be the case as Webflow added an "Enable custom code" toggle in preview mode, which lets you test it right in the Designer interface.
- GSAP 100% free: Late last year Webflow announced that they acquired GSAP, which is a JavaScript animation library. Which was partially free, but the cool features were locked behind a paid version. Now it's totally free for everyone!
Webflow Cloud
This new feature is starting to roll out in a limited beta and should allow teams to deploy full-stack web applications and dynamic web experiences on Webflow. Some of the examples they provided: booking engines with dynamic availability and user authentication, headless e-commerce storefronts, long-tail SEO keyword campaigns, employee directories and internal HR portals, ...
Learn more about Webflow Cloud
Spline: Hana
Spline added a new 2D animation editor to their platform. It lets you do real time vector editing, with support for advanced vector networks (like you can find in, and originally invented by Figma). Create event driven interactions like reacting to hover states, keyboard inputs, ...
Framer improvements
Framer added a set of new features including: CMS index variables, which allows you to change the layout of a specific CMS item for example, which will make your lists or grids more interesting and not look the same. On top of that there is now also an option to build plugins for the localization feature as they added APIs for developers, Framer made use of that new API themselves by building a Locale Sync plugin that let's you import and export strings if you want to use them in/from a different tool. And finally there is now support for REM sizing, which makes it much easier to build responsive layouts.
Mobile testing in Maze
Maze has a new mobile app, currently in beta, called Maze Participate that allows you to do user testing directly on a mobile device. This eliminates the need to test in a mobile browser, where the browser UI could impact the test results and you can capture: audio, screen and video all at the same time. There is also no need for participants to sign in or create an account, they can just scan a QR code and start testing.
Lovable 2.0
The next version of Lovable is here with some great improvements:
- Security Scan: automatically detect any security vulnerabilities in your code
- Multiplayer: work on a project together with your team
- Chat Mode Agent: This new agent is smarter and doesn't edit the code, but is great for asking questions, planning your project or debugging your existing code.
- Dev mode: edit code directly in lovable
- Visual edits: a more robust version of the existing feature where you can select elements and edit them via the visual editor.
- New brand & UI: a cleaner interface to make building your ideas faster and easier.
Motiff AI 2.0
Another 2.0 version, Motiff is an AI Partner for UI Design which helps you improve existing and design new interfaces. It can generate UI from text or images, use style presets from existing design systems, iterate on your current design, and there is also an MCP server to connect right to your code editor.