Hey Reader,

As you may know, Figma announced a new set of features at yesterday's Config keynote. Check out the roundup below of everything that launched 👇

femke @femkesvs Everything worth knowing from @figma's keynote at #config 🧵 As said by @zoink himself – "In the months and years ahead, there will be an absolute explosion of creativity, risk taking, and bold expression" Let's see where Figma plans to go #FigmaCreator 5:30 PM • Jun 24, 2026 2 Retweets 37 Likes Read 3 replies

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Related, something has shifted in the conversations I'm having with designers lately. The question used to be "should I learn to code?" Now it's "how do I build well, and fast?"

The links this week kept landing on the same place — designers who are moving, making, and stress-testing before they ever write a spec.

In today's email:

• Designers becoming builders: At Gusto we moved our entire design team off static Figma files in a single quarter. Slack is using AI-assisted code to generate evidence before committing to anything. Atlassian stress-tested a new format for giving AI agents design context. Three very different teams, all pointing the same direction.
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• What's distinctly human in AI-generated work: Designer Christine Røde from The Browser Company shared a behind-the-scenes on designing Artifacts for Dia — the core challenge being how you make AI-generated docs feel like a person wrote them. The Glimmer Network's new series picks up a similar thread: who are you outside of what you produce?
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• Resources worth saving: Real interview take-home assignments from design leader, a Chris Do sales training event in Vancouver this August, and a few other gems.

Join Julia Ysabela Fernandez (Meta) and Linn Vizard (Made Manifest) for a practical session on creating more engaging, collaborative rooms even when they’re virtual or high-stakes. You’ll learn simple facilitation techniques to spark participation, build trust, and help people contribute more meaningfully. ​ ​🎟️ Save your spot​

Design gems of the week

• ​Evolving from designers to builders: A detailed behind-the-scenes look at how we at Gusto went AI-native in one quarter: building our own MCP tooling, shipped PRs and a move away from static Figma files entirely and rethinking what “handoff” means when design starts living closer to production.
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• ​How I validated design decisions before writing production code: A read on using AI-assisted prototypes to stress-test decisions before anything ships. Luca Masud's approach turns exploration from theory into something that actually happens.
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• ​Atlassian’s DESIGN.md is here​: Atlassian tested Google's portable design context format, useful for quick prototyping and on-brand one-shot UIs. An honest breakdown of the tradeoffs worth understanding.
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• ​​Behind the design of Dia Artifacts​: From one of their designers on how to make AI-generated docs feel human. The thesis came from constraints of old physical media where formatting was earned, not free.
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• ​​Design Tasks​: A collection of take-home design assignments completed while interviewing for senior, staff, and founding designer roles, from problem framing through to final solution. A rare look at what senior-level design thinking actually looks like in an interview context.
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• ​​Natural Born Seller: A full-day workshop with Chris Do on the skills designers often sidestep; pricing conversations, handling objections, closing. Early bird tickets ($700) end July 4.
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• ​​Fear Buster Launch Series: Three $25 career sprints for designers covering financial clarity, naming what's not working, and identity beyond your job title.
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• ​Tabfolio Framer template: A clean portfolio template built around tabbed navigation, making it easy to organize projects, writing, experience, and links without the page feeling cluttered.

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Open design roles worth a look

• ​Analyst, UX​ - United Airlines
• ​Founding product designer - Gumloop
• ​Lead UX Researcher - Target

A MESSAGE FROM FRAMER Time for designers to learn how to branch Branching is one of the Framer updates I’m most excited about. When you’re using AI to explore ideas, you don’t always want to overwrite what you have — you want to try directions, compare them, and keep moving. Framer’s latest release makes that easier, alongside model selection, prompt references for layers and styles, and support for external agents. ​​→ ​Try Framer 3.0 with Agents​

Your manager is advocating for you right now. Are you making it easy?

Somewhere, at some point in the year, your manager sits in a room with other managers and talks about their teams.
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You're not there — but your work is, or at least the story of your work is.
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And the difference between those two things might be the most important career insight I can share with you.
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Here's something I've watched play out in those rooms more than once.
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Two managers, same meeting, both rating their designer as Exceeding Expectations at the same level.
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Manager A makes their case first — genuine, clearly well-intentioned, but thin. A few sentences about solid execution and reliable delivery.
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Then Manager B goes, and the room leans in.
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The rationale is specific, connected to real outcomes, and other managers are nodding — not because anyone coordinated beforehand, but because Designer B's work had traveled. Their contributions were visible enough, wide enough, that people outside their immediate team had felt them.
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The room starts to quietly wonder whether Manager A's designer really belongs in the same category.
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Neither designer was there. But one of them had already done the work of being in the room.

This is the thing nobody tells you about getting promoted at senior and above: your manager can only advocate with the material you've given them.

If your impact is deep but narrow — excellent work, known only to the people immediately around you — your manager is left reconstructing it from memory, alone, in a room full of people who are all doing the same thing for their own reports.
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That's a hard position to put someone in, and most designers don't even realize they're doing it.
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The designers who move up aren't always the most talented. They're the ones whose managers can tell a story — specific, confident, naturally backed up by people in the room who've felt the impact firsthand. Their work isn't just good. It's legible to people who weren't there when it happened.

I want to be careful here because I know "make your work more visible" can sound like advice to self-promote, which most designers I know find deeply uncomfortable.

That's not what I mean.

This isn't about broadcasting or building a personal brand inside your company. It's about making sure the shape of your thinking — your decisions, your rationale, your influence on where the product is actually going — exists somewhere beyond the meeting it happened in.
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​A few things worth sitting with:

• Could your manager describe your impact in a single specific sentence right now, without having to think too hard?
• Are there people outside your immediate team who could speak to your contributions unprompted?
• When you push back on a direction or reframe a brief, does that thinking live anywhere — or does it disappear the moment the meeting ends?

Most senior designers I work with are doing genuinely strong work. The gap usually isn't effort or talent. It's that their thinking is only legible to the people who were already in the room with them.
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If you want to go deeper on what actually happens in these conversations — what managers are really listening for, and what makes a rationale land versus fall flat — I got into it in a recent video that's worth watching if you're heading into any kind of review cycle soon.
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​→ The promotion conversation you never hear​

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The room is already happening. The only question is what story it's telling about you.

Have a topic you'd like me to write about? Reply to this email and let me know! I read every reply.