Case Study Club

Figma design agent is back

Figma shipped its Design Agent on Wednesday last week.

You might have forgotten, but this is not Figma's first run at agents. June 2024, Config in San Francisco. Figma launched its first AI push. The feature was Make Designs. Within days, Dylan Field pulled it. The generated outputs looked like clones of Apple's Weather app. The bigger fight was about data. Users had been defaulted opt-in to training on their content. The community treated it as another Adobe moment. Figma flipped the defaults under pressure. A California class action followed.

That was the 2024 question. Should Figma have your data.

The 2026 Design Agent answers a different one. The boldest 2024 claim is gone. No more design-from-prompt. The agent works on what's already in the file. It renames variables, swaps components, summarizes comments. Three jobs, all canvas-bound.

Last week I wrote that Figma stopped being the design team's source of truth. I'd closed Figma mid-project and run every iteration through Claude Code. That was one designer's experience, but it isn't private anymore. The State of AI 2026 survey landed this week. Vercel published its actual tool stack. Anthropic engineers moved their planning docs from Markdown to HTML so they could brief Claude Code with richer specs and interactive artifacts.

The work has left the canvas, for the people most likely to adopt the new agent.

So the 2026 question is the workflow one. Should Figma still have it?

— Google I/O 2026 announced Gemini 3.5 Flash alongside seven creative tools, including Omni (video), Flow (cinematic editing), Stitch (UI), and Pomelli (brand assets). Several aren't actually available. Lenny's day-1 recap.

— Fraude launched a website builder marketed as explicitly AI-free. fraude.design.

— Fred Perry released "An Inventory of Detail," a zine made with designer Scott King examining the 1952 polo shirt as cultural artifact. Creative Review.

— Idea magazine is reissuing Jessica Gysel's cult lesbian zine Kutt as a single collected volume, twenty years after its original 2002–03 run. Creative Review.

— UX Collective argues AI agents violate the Doherty Threshold: sub-second response keeps users productive, agents take minutes. The waiting problem in AI products.

The Useless Web counts its losses

The Useless Web has been a directory of bizarre, purposeless websites since 2011.

This month it published a list of the sites it can no longer send you to. Domain lapsed, server gone, Flash retired, builder abandoned. Each title is followed by what killed it.

The list reads as a quiet inventory of design-as-play. Cats wearing shoes. Counters of how many times something on the internet has happened. Pages built in an afternoon for the joke of being built, then served for a decade until the credit card expired or the renewal email landed in someone's spam folder.

There is no institutional archive for sites like these. The Wayback Machine catches some. Most are gone with the host and disappear without notice.

The end of the logo hunt

theSVG is an open-source library of more than six thousand brand SVG icons, built by an independent maintainer, Gagan. Search it like an index. Copy what you need. The catalog covers the logos that designers and developers reach for most often: services, frameworks, payment brands, dev tools, social platforms.

Written and edited by Jan Haaland. Published weekly from Norway.

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