Design Thursday #79
A weekly recap of everything you need to know about tools, events, guidelines and design in general.
Sketch MCP
While the team at Sketch is still hard at work on their next big release featuring Liquid Glass, they did release quite an exciting beta this week. This new beta includes a local Sketch MCP server that you can use to build your designs faster in code using the get_selection_as_image tool. But even more exciting is the run_code tool, which allows you to access all Sketch APIs that plugins also have access to. This means that you can basically control Sketch using MCP. You can recreate a design from a screenshot, bring your code components to design, adapt your existing designs to match your codebase's design tokens, and much more.
Have a look at Sketch's MCP docs
Here's a sneak peak of the new Sketch design featuring over 700 new icons:
Maze AI Moderator
Similar to user research tools like Genway and Conveo, Maze added AI Moderator. An AI-powered interview tool to do in-depth user research at scale.
Stark updates
Stark released its first-ever code integration with a React linter that can detect accessibility issues right in your code editor. There were also some improvements to Figma annotations that detect what frames haven't been annotated with, the option to auto-annotate them. Focus order and headers also got an update in the browser extensions, that make them easier to audit.
Image generation in Hana
Spline's Hana now has built-in AI image generation using different models. You can make variations, remove the background, upscale images, and modify or animate them with Hana's built-in effects.
Learn more about image generation in Hana
Right-to-Left direction in Framer
Framer added, maybe a first in any design tool, Right-to-Left Direction, a great localization feature. Framer will now automatically change the layout of Stacks and Grids for languages that read from right to left, making it match the reading direction. The setting is turned on by default for new projects; for existing projects, you can turn it on in Settings > Layout Direction. You can also use a new Layout Direction Variable to adjust any property on your Canvas.
Read more about Right-to-Left Direction
Create FigJam diagrams in ChatGPT
Figma is one of the first partners of OpenAI for the newly announced ChatGPT apps. With the Figma app, you will be able to create FigJam diagrams directly from a conversation in ChatGPT.
Good to know: It's currently not yet available in the EU.
Learn more about Figma in ChatGPT
Figma Make Connectors
Figma is bringing other MCPs to Make to make the context of your prototypes even more powerful. An example they shared was a spec doc from Notion that can be read out via MCP to directly make changes in a Make prototype.
Connectors is currently in beta and rolling out later this month. It will integrate first with Notion, Atlassian, Linear, and Asana.
GenUI: AI-Generated Interfaces
The NNgroup published a video about Generative UI that uses real-time AI to personalize and create interfaces. No longer using a one-size-fits-all design, but something that can be different from every single user. It's a simple, but informative video that makes you think of what your interface could look like in the future.