Noah Levin

Having fun this week? Want to keep the fun going? Our Design team is hiring: figma.com/careers/

@dipalua_ @runwayml congrats dipa!!

first day of school @runwayml!!!

@jenny_wen @cursor_ai Congrats Jenny!!!!

ok! quick updates from me: - i left anthropic (who does that?!) - had a baby (i love her) - and am joining @cursor_ai as head of design (eep!) it's been a low-key dream of mine to nurture a team that cares so deeply about craft, quality, and building great tools. very excited!

Finished the final tweaks on my 3D Inflation shader for @figma – here's the community release! figma.com/community/file… Capable of a huge range of looks including balloon, vacuum formed plastic, neon tubes, latex, rubber etc, and a lot of fun to play with!

We recently soft launched 🌸riffs: a way to quickly share an experiment, an idea or a detail directly from your canvas to figma community Watch @miggi take it for a spin

I have been thinking about whether to comment on this. Not clear if Gal is serious, rage baiting, etc. Whatever the case, it has spread enough in the design community that I want to share some thoughts. The psychological journey people go through with AI is quite fascinating to me. A new model launches, people think the world has changed, they sometimes have an existential crisis, then they play with the model, they understand its strengths and limitations and then they settle down. A few weeks later, the cycle repeats. On top of this, even before AI, designers have often shown insecurity and imposter syndrome. There are probably many reasons for this. First, before ~2010 design wasn't valued by the tech industry in the way it is today. Second, the people attracted to working in the field of design are often very open to new ideas and have high empathy. Third, there is no "one path" to working as a designer and designer backgrounds are often pretty random. Ironically, despite the insecurity + imposter syndrome so many designers feel, design is more important than ever. I truly believe this. And yes, I have an incentive to believe this. But just think about it... the logic couldn't be more clear. More design is entering the world, the attention economy is real and therefore creativity / design / point of view is how you will stand out. Your brand, marketing, product design, moments of delight and overall customer journey must be excellent. Some companies already get this and are fighting wild battles over design talent. Other companies are still figuring it out. Everyone will get there and it will be obvious in retrospect. This isn't a new trend with AI. It is a trend that we've seen over the last decade. Designers used to complain about not having a seat at the table. Now designers have a seat at the table. And many of the businesses I speak with are pulling from their design bench when looking for new leaders for their business... they know that design thinking and the design process is what they need to adopt everywhere to win. I'm not saying that every stakeholder gets it. But so many are trying to learn right now. Designers need to do more than create great work, they have to spend a lot more effort educating. Showing work can also trigger anxiety. Sometimes the best solution to a design challenge is the first thing you think of. And other times you have to explore for quite a long time to come up with something great. Inputs to a design process might include things that feel like traditional office work and are easy to point to... reading docs, talking with teammates, formal research, etc. Inputs might also include a walk in the park, an interesting dream you had the night before, a good song you listened to on the radio during your commute, a painting from the 1800's or all sorts of other cultural / emotional input. In summary, I've never been more confident in the role of design and impact design can have. I wish designers felt the same confidence. This is the moment to be more bold, to take more creative risk, to double down on the power of design. Everyone is on their own journey, and there are lots of fascinating ways to move through life, so if Gal is serious about "quitting design" then I wish him the best in his adventures ahead. But I hope if others follow they do it because there are other things they are so excited about spending time on vs fear of AI.

Models seem to LOVE the names Maya, Priya, Alex... I wonder if this will affect the next generation of kids names subconsciously one way or the other.

Great read from @loredanacrisan and @itsnicethat — covers some nice touches on Design philosophy and culture in the age of AI @figma 💙

@ryhanhassan @Gavmn congrats!!!

We're live! So excited to launch the next generation of models for interacting with computers alongside the incredibly talented @Gavmn GPT-Live-1 feels much more like talking to a person in the same room, and is significantly more capable and intelligent.

It is nicely crafted! Clever take on loading states and progressive disclosure and all that. Feels nicely polished. I suspect over time it’d be good for answers to get a bit denser; one of those things that looks great at first and in marketing materials but can make your eyes work harder than they need to with more frequent or efficient use. One big thing is I can’t figure out though is how to find my recent chat history… can you? I had a nice chat going and now it feels like it could be gone forever. Maybe a bug @erenbali?

Played with this today - really well crafted take on generative UI with structured outputs

Huge improvement to generating images in @figma just dropped — can finally queue up as much as you want concurrently

Wow totally missed this video when it launched. Love it: youtube.com/watch?v=-ueUb6…

Mix and matching npm packages + web apis to make sick Generative plugins in @figma. 🔓 I can't believe how well this worked. 🧵

Very excited to release my 3D Extrude shader for @figma to the community! Grab the finished shader and examples file here to start using it in your designs: figma.com/community/file… Would love to see what you all make with it!

@sheherenow_ @rogie love this — tons of new opportunities unlocked with multimodal stuff now worth exploring… also fun config talk to watch that in a way shows interpretive dance → code through motion: youtube.com/watch?v=Lo-HSC…

@nlevin @rogie figma feature request

2017 ~ we still haven’t done Interpretive Dance->code yet

Playing with @figma Motion and shaders today! Tried recreating one of my old blob animation explorations, and it’s so much fun to experiment with different settings and combine them together. In this example, I combined my custom blob mask shader with a lens distortion shader to create this effect. Really love how easy it is to iterate and discover new looks.

Fully realtime 3D inflation shader in @figma. Pretty hyped about this one! Need to polish it up and make the UI a bit easier to use but will share in a couple of days. Soooo much fun to play with!

@figma Generative plugins can use on-canvas handles. Lets use it to manipulate a vector. Here are 3 quick examples that build on each other: 1. point 2. point + radius 3. point + angle + radius 4. multiple handles next: point + radius 🧵

Figma Motion in Figma Motion

@hhsayshello @RAC Yes, I think so!!! If it helps jog memory, I've seen him 4 times: 2014: fillmore 2015: coachella 2016: outside lands 2017: rough trade NYC

@nlevin @RAC Was that show we went to in 20XX (we are old) RAC??? I think it was! 💃

how it started / how it's going

absolute banger of a talk from the legend @RAC from #config2026 is now on youtube — check it out! youtube.com/watch?v=mdxJNK…