Design Thursday #98
A weekly recap of everything you need to know about tools, events, guidelines and design in general.
Recraft Exploration Mode
Recraft added Exploration Mode to V4. Instead of crafting the perfect prompt upfront, you start with something short and get eight visual directions at once. Pick the one that feels closest and continue from there. Five similarity levels control how much creative freedom the next generation gets, from loose interpretation to near-duplicate refinements. It's designed for concept exploration, brand work, and any situation where covering a lot of ground quickly matters more than nailing the final result on the first try.
Read more about Exploration Mode
Adobe Firefly
Adobe gave Firefly a big update. Custom models are now in public beta: you can train a model on your own images to capture a specific illustration style, character, or photographic look. Once trained it becomes a reusable foundation across projects, private by default.
Firefly now also gives you access to over 30 models in one place, including Adobe's Firefly Image Model 5, Google's Veo 3.1, Runway Gen-4.5, and Kling 2.5 Turbo. A new Quick Cut feature turns raw footage into a structured first cut in minutes. And Project Moonlight, a conversational agentic interface that works across Adobe apps, is in private beta.
Rive Editor 0.8.4450
A solid quality-of-life update landed for Rive this week. The main addition is a new data table view when selecting a View Model, making it much easier to manage large amounts of data and view model instances. The State Machine UI also got some improvements: Listeners are now organized under their related state machine in the animation tree, and you can now add tags to Timelines, State Machines, Listeners, and Folders via right-click. Single Listeners now also support multiple actions. Plus the usual round of fixes and runtime improvements across Web, Framer, Android, Apple, React Native, Unreal, and Unity.
See the Rive editor release notes
Framer Updates
Static Files
Framer added Static Files, a new way to serve files from your Framer domain at any path you want. You can upload files for verification flows, manifests, and other assets, and manage them all in one place alongside your other Advanced Hosting settings. Each file supports a full lifecycle, so you can create, update, replace, and delete them. If you were previously using redirect workarounds to serve files at root paths like /.well-known/, those are no longer needed.
Shaders
Framer now has shaders. You can add animated gradients, image effects, and particle effects to your projects directly from the Insert Panel. Each shader works as its own self-contained tool with lots of customization options, and they're built to be highly performant for the web. Drag and drop to add one and start tweaking from there.
Design with Agents on the Figma Canvas
Probably the biggest update of the week. Figma opened the beta for AI agents writing directly to your design files via the Figma MCP server. Agents read your library first and build with your existing components, variables, and tokens, so the output reflects your actual design system. Skills are how you control how agents work in Figma. There's a foundational /figma-use skill to start with, and you can write your own since it's just a markdown file. Works with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot CLI, VS Code, and a few others.
Read more about agents on the Figma canvas
Paper Snapshot
Paper added a new feature called Snapshot. You can snapshot your live website and paste it directly into Paper as editable layers. So instead of taking a screenshot and manually recreating things, you're working with real HTML and CSS from the start. A nice addition to Paper's MCP workflow that makes it even easier to go back and forth between your site and the canvas.
Omma by Spline
Spline launched a new platform called Omma for creating 3D interactive websites and apps. It combines 3D generation, image generation, and language models in a single place. You can run parallel agents, remix content, and create variants. It's a pretty different angle from Spline itself, more of an all-in-one creative builder with 3D at the core.
Becoming an AI-Native Designer
Dive Club published a new episode with Kris Puckett, who has led design at Mercury, Dropbox, and now Stripe. He goes behind the scenes of his Epilogue app, how to create custom skills with Claude Code, and how he taught Claude to be a metal shader expert. Good watch if you want a concrete look at what going all-in with AI as a designer actually looks like. He also has a new course at heyneuma.com.
Designing Through Uncertainty: Craft, AI and Discomfort
Hugo Raymond, Designer Advocate at Figma, gave a talk on craft, AI, and discomfort. It's not about choosing sides. It's more about understanding how they shape each other, reframing what risk and failure mean for designers right now, and how to use new tools to grow rather than just replace skills. Worth watching if you've been feeling the ambient unease in the design community around this topic.
The New Designer's Superpower
Dive Club also posted a conversation with Jenny Wen, who led design on FigJam and now designs Claude at Anthropic. Her observation that both are the same problem, hiding serious technical complexity behind something that feels obvious, is worth sitting with. She also talks about why designers are shipping production code and her framework for this moment: automate toil, augment creativity.