Design

Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn about how artificial intelligence works, and how users think about it.

Granola is a brand that’s certainly made itself known in recent months – at least to those using various lines on the London Underground. Indeed, there was a time when you could barely move for its ad...

Harriet Mena Hill is devoted to documenting a community amid demolition. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as l...

The writer, editor and founder of Girlhood Studies unpacks her ideal weekend lineup: gallery shows, vintage shopping and Gregg Araki films included.

Hidden Valley Ranch is getting into the Halloween spirit with Spooky Ranch, a limited-edition black dressing packed in a glow-in-the-dark bottle. Available exclusively at Walmart, it's the same Hidden...

How people react to being told that AI helped create a piece of content varies with audience, context, the nature and degree of AI use.

Have you found yourself stunned by the Surrealist works of Remedios Varo? Same. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing f...

The Independent tier at the DIELINE Awards 2027 is a billing decision, not a judging one. Fall Entry closes September 30 at 23:59 GMT. The post Five or fewer people? Your entry is $275, not $385 appea...

Food Thoughts brings new energy to home baking with colorful packs, a playful thought bubble logo, and a charming chef character. The refreshed range makes premium cake mixes and baking essentials loo...

Mezzello Spritz turns Mediterranean travel into a colorful canned escape, with each flavor pairing citrus illustrations with a destination inspired scene. Vintage travel poster references meet oversiz...

Bel Brands' beloved Laughing Cow has suddenly stopped smiling in new promotional packaging released this week. And no one knows why. The post Why Isn’t The Laughing Cow Laughing? appeared first...

Potato-carved typography and year-round crunch? Little Latke and agency Wonderkind are reimagining the traditional Jewish staple as a shelf-stable snack with playful packaging design and custom potato...

A PDF looks like a document. Structurally, it behaves more like a printed page that happens to be digital — every letter, image, and line sits at a fixed coordinate, locked in place the same way ink s...

Getting to a prototype is easier than ever. The harder work is sustaining speed all the way to launch, choosing the right direction, and creating products that stand out. Here’s what that takes.

Taehyoung Maria Jeon reimagines the plants cohabitating in her apartment, beginning with leaves and stems before venturing into surreal terrain. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become...

The brand for Canica combines constructivist geometry with expressive illustration, creating a visual world that’s fun but not too childish.

The new "better-for-you" snack brand is the latest to tap into the "kidult" trend, yearning to bring back the magic of Dunkaroos in the cafeteria. The post Sidepiece Taps into the Snackstalgic Demo W...

Supple mountains cradled by lakes and forests are tinged with magical realism. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing f...

Made during a year-long outpatient programme, the experimental comic combines drawings, journals, ephemera and text messages to document the artist’s turbulent inner world.

For fifteen years, Leckerlee and Strohl have turned traditional lebkuchen tins into an ever growing collection of illustrated keepsakes. Across 46 designs, German references meet folk art, Alpine scen...

Good Apple gives a nostalgic staple a fresh place in today’s beverage aisle, pairing a classic glass milk bottle with playful fruit illustrations and vintage inspired typography. Drawing from orchard...

No shopping bag? There's a jacket for that. Called “Swag for Life,” Aldi's latest utilitarian fashion piece is a waterproof navy bomber that transforms into a shopping bag. The post Aldi Turns Shoppin...

Packaging expert Lisa Cain reviews Willow & Blake’s visual identity and packaging design for postpartum hair loss brand Bouf. The post Some Names Just Sound Thick appeared first on BP&O...

There’s a big difference between having an idea and making it real, and in that space is where learning happens. Here’s how teachers are using Figma to give their students hands-on design experiences.

Abe imagines dreamlike scenes reminiscent of childhood narratives and folk tales. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishin...

For Disabled people and those living with chronic illness, cooking can be a tricky and arduous task, but this is something often ignored in mainstream foodie culture – typically led by trends, fads an...

Wilson's movie debut is primed for absurdity, delving into something that's immanently mundane yet fundamental to the way we live. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Mem...

Aiming to do justice in portraying the world of Mexico’s real-life superhero wrestlers, this photographer gets stuck in, no matter the peril.

The more-than-human world comes alive in the designer’s visual translations of nature’s hidden patterns.

We built ten small demos with one Web Awesome component and a lot of dumb greeting copy. Some of them we'd ship tomorrow. A couple we'd argue about first. <wa-random-content> is one of the sma...

When looking at a well-designed website, poster, app, or magazine spread, we often notice what is there: the typography, colors, images, illustrations, and carefully placed buttons. But some of the mo...

If you’ve heard of Mozilla, it’s probably thanks to Firefox, the search engine perhaps most famous for its dedication to the more utopian ideals of the internet – things like remaining an independent...

This year's cycle received more than 340 video entries from 40 different countries. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishi...

Aiming to move beyond the spoken word, Templo teams up with DeafCity Hub to create purpose-driven campaign visuals that centre and celebrate Deaf culture.

Brown's work is currently on view in 'The Peace of Wild Things' at Joy Machine. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing f...

The biggest change coming to product design may not be a better interface. It may be the disappearance of the interface itself.Continue reading on Muzli - Design Inspiration »

Over the past ten years, the studio has kept the pulse of China’s clubbing scene alive from the inside, with innovative visuals that always point back to print.

This year, the competition welcomed more than 24,000 entries from photographers around the globe. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent...

The Figma Make screens looked finished. They also defaulted a consent toggle to on, lied about the step count, and failed accessibility…Continue reading on Muzli - Design Inspiration »

The multidisciplinary designer and artist shares what’s in her “mental database”: an off-putting tarot deck, a Jockstrap CD, and a recurring dream about aerial silks.

In our era of digital screens and virtually endless images and videos, it's a challenge to imagine the time before photography existed. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Coloss...

The director chats to It’s Nice That about his first feature film, The History of Concrete, and the process by which his comedic explorations of the banal become so beautiful.

She dominated summer 2026, appearing on stage at nearly 30 festivals across the world, but Zara Larsson’s fame flourished from behind the screen. It’s Nice That’s culture columnist looks at how an aud...

The discourse surrounding AI feel relentless due to its rate of progress; what’s new-fangled one week is out of date the next. This is particularly worrying when you feel like your career is getting c...

The creative studio have avoided clinical tropes and brought scientific rigour to the beauty space to tell a new story of slow luxury, rooted in care.

We touch base with the brilliant illustrator Lia Sued C. on how she moved away from a solely digital practice to refining her skills through physical materials.

There is a moment in every product manager’s life that is both humbling and mysterious: the moment you lose a user who should have stayed. They engaged with the product, praised its features, an...

Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn about recommendations for designing AI products and features.

“Nano-hydroxyapatite” isn’t exactly memorable – it takes a few tries to even attempt to figure out how to say it, and I’d wager that there aren’t too many people who can tell you what on earth it is,...

At October’s event in London, expect talks about photography of Venezuelan youth, high-profile motion design and playful multi-media illustration.

AI-agent power users curate 3 kinds of context: global (across tasks), local (task-specific), and ambient (raw streams like email).

Follow Jackie Crespo and Gabino Azuela around Mexico City and tour its underground print and zine scene...

Two proposals. Two meetings. Two very different outcomes. The first proposal was a thing of beauty. It was detailed, thorough, and visually stunning. It outlined every phase of the project, listed eve...

Created between paid commissions, Running Late follows a surreal morning routine populated by stubby-legged alarm clocks and a crocodile that dispenses toothpaste.

Self-funded by Studio Trikken, Banana Art Book includes over 100 banana artworks created by artists from all over the world – from students and emerging illustrators to renowned design studios

It is a strange experience to be the one person who does not like a design that everyone else adores. You look at the praise, the awards, and the enthusiastic comments, and you feel like you are missi...

Take up to 5 in-depth training courses, teaching user experience best practices for successful design. Training focused on long-lasting skills for UX professionals. December 2 - December 15, 2026.

Packaging expert Lisa Cain reviews A Friend Of Mine’s work for The Cocktail Cabinet’s recipe card packs for home bars and cocktail lovers. The post Design That Stirs appeared first on BP&a...

Community publishing is now live for Weave tools. Here are a few tools that stand out, from turning a moodboard into a realistic room mockup to previewing your next nail set.

From the Yellow Pages and Rolodex to the early internet, this web designer is drawing on references from the past to make the sustainable websites of the future.

In an age of streaming domination and scattergun viewing habits, how do you pay homage to the slow craft of cinema? The Pentagram partner’s analogue identity for London’s biggest film festival lights...

Szilveszter Makó’s surreal portraits have become nearly as recognisable as the celebrities he photographs. Our US editor-at-large considers what subjects bring to a signature style – and what happens...

There is a version of every product that never sees the light of day. It lives in a file, preserved in a meeting room, or on a whiteboard that was erased long ago. It is not a failed design. It is a d...

Arguably, we’re approaching a time that could be seen to be ‘post-woo-woo’ – as in, those things that have long been dismissed as daft; the preserve of silly women and charlatans and people whose live...

The creative coder explains the throughline between drawing and computation, and why he’s jealous of pioneering artist Lillian Schwartz.

Client explainers, onboarding modules and brand updates all need a presenter, filming time, and another session whenever the script changes. AI avatars cut most of that out, particularly for video tha...

A career in graphic design begins with creativity, but professional success requires much more than having an eye for visuals. Graphic designers need to understand how to communicate ideas, solve prob...

I know… Your coding agent can spin up a component, write the copy, and wire up your API call without breaking a sweat. But ask it to drop in the right icon, and things get janky fast. Maybe it guesse...

A logo that depends on color to be recognizable is not a logo. It is a graphic with a crutch. The moment your brand appears in black and white, on a receipt, a fax, a watermarked document, a one-color...

AI tools make it feasible to build fully interactive prototypes of complex interfaces so you can test them with users earlier in the design process.

Figma strengthens data protection and security for enterprise customers with local data hosting.

NN/G uses AI for clarity, formatting, and critique, but humans retain editorial judgment and responsibility for every article.

There’s so much to love about this identity – not least that it manages to make a noodle joint look like a perennially hip skate brand (yes, I am obviously talking about Supreme – all no-nonsense stoc...

Read the book, Typographic Firsts I’ve forever fancied fat faces. And not just for the alliteration. And I’ve found the perfect weight in a comparatively new design with vintage flavor: the revi...

Packaging expert Lisa Cain shares her opinion on oral hygiene brand Smart Life The post Oral Care Shelves…Where Good Design Usually Goes To Die appeared first on BP&O - Branding, Packaging a...

True collaboration isn’t always comfortable.

Most design systems stop where the article starts. Web Awesome keeps going: one class styles a whole block of content, a type scale is there when you need to place text by hand, and CSS @scope keeps a...

It was a simple card. A single line of text on the front, centered, with generous margins. The paper was thick, the ink was dark, and the empty space around the words was vast. The card did not try to...

Founded in 1933, Fairway Market is an independent regional supermarket chain with stores across New York. The grocery retailer sells food and household goods, and over the past eight decades or so has...

Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn about the best ways to use artificial intelligence for UX work.

Take up to 2 in-depth training courses, teaching user experience best practices for successful design. Live online training focused on long-lasting skills for UX professionals. Nov 16 - Nov 19, 2026 (...

I struggle to think of a subculture I detest quite as viscerally and deeply as steampunks: not only is it aesthetically quite hideous, I just don’t really get it – it’s the past! But the future! But v...

One of the internet’s favorite designers shares why her cyberdeck doubles as a makeup vanity, and the questions she asks herself to get into a creative space.

Packaging expert Lisa Cain shares her opinion on brand Michu’s cat litter range. The post Packaging’s Dirtiest Job appeared first on BP&O - Branding, Packaging and Opinion.

The Coinbase Design System team put Code Connect to the test against coding agents—and found that it boosted design system adherence while cutting token costs by an average of 22.5%.

Take up to 5 in-depth training courses, teaching user experience best practices for successful design. Training focused on long-lasting skills for UX professionals. September 14 - September 25, 2026.

Orkest Phion – or Phion Symphony Orchestra in English – is a Dutch travelling symphony orchestra that was formed in 2019 through the merger of the Netherlands Symphony Orchestra and Het Gelders Orkest...

Starting today, you’ll have more creative control over generative plugins and shaders, and a way to share what you’ve made with the community. Product Designer Rogie King tells the story of how we got...

AI can help you organize research you’ve already collected, but it can’t create research evidence about the specific, messy experience of real users.

In 2024, we kicked off a study to understand how AI would reshape design and product development. Now, AI is helping us run it.

AI lets teams build faster than UX can evaluate. UX can adapt by building shared judgment, accelerating evaluation, and guiding AI-generated designs.

Thom Bettridge on which magazines have shaped his taste—and what design rule he breaks the most.

Icons may look like the smallest pieces of a design system, but they do some of the heaviest lifting. A well-built icon library communicates faster than words, scales across every surface, and — when...

Coding agents are reshaping how developers build, but they’re only as good as the input they’re given. This workflow explores how context keeps code and canvas in sync.

Take up to 5 in-depth training courses, teaching user experience best practices for successful design. Courses focused on long-lasting skills for UX professionals. November 9 - 13, 2026.

🎨 Figma Design Kit 3.0 The Official Figma Design Kit has hit its 3.0 version. We’ve added ten new components, closing the gap between Figma and the library: Accordion Checkbox Group Date Input Date...

Plain-language definitions of the AI terms that come up in product and design work, from tokens and context windows to agents, evals, and prompt injection.

When users didn’t know whether an image was AI-generated, the images we tested did not create any perception penalty compared to stock photos.

Agentic products pose a unique set of design challenges. How do you build a tool that’s powerful and knowledgeable enough to be a true partner, while keeping trust and security at the core? Here’s wha...

The latest release of Shoelace shipped on March 11, 2025. It’s still on npm, it’s still two lines away from any HTML page, and it still works as well today as it did the day it went out. It’s also the...

Read the book, Typographic Firsts The legendary type designer Adrian Frutiger once described an epiphany he had: “When I put my pen to a blank sheet, black isn’t added, but rather the white sheet is d...

Psychological ownership can make you more effective, but you’ll struggle if it attaches to things you can’t control. Spot misplaced ownership and redirect it.

One output cannot establish how well an AI system performs. Evaluate with multiple representative inputs, repeated runs, and confidence intervals.

If Part 1 was the pitch and Part 2 was the parts list, this is your build guide. We’re getting hands-on — auditing what you’ve got, defining what you need, and laying the groundwork for a system that...

With AI, speed comes easy, but so does tech debt. That’s why the best teams don’t just ship something fast; they consider it carefully, build it efficiently, and make it stand out.

Now you can author skills for our agent, directly in Figma, to put your point of view to work. Here are 10 of our favorites to get you started.

The Figma Data Science team assumed that AI saves users time—but quantifying it required a new approach to research design.

Read the book, Typographic Firsts Massimo Vignelli was canonically adamant that a contemporary designer only requires a handful of typefaces and should “trash the rest.” He was talking abo...

Dogfooding, or using your own products internally, helps catch bugs, but it can't replace user research: your team knows too much to represent real users.

Pressure to adopt AI isn't evidence that a tool helps. The PROVE framework tests one tool against one task and produces a provisional decision you can defend.

When going from design to code, agents lack the context of your production components. With Code Connect in Figma’s MCP, they get that context. We measured its impact on token usage, task duration, an...

A wizard is never late, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to. The new Icon Wizard just arrived, and it hands you a brand-new toolbox and thousands upon thousands of icons to raid...

Take up to 2 in-depth training courses, teaching user experience best practices for successful design. Training focused on long-lasting skills for UX professionals. October 26 - October 29, 2026.

From treating code as a proposal to turning handoffs into conversations, here's how we shaped a new way of working to ship nested folders.

More than 90% of product builders say AI skills are essential to their future success. But what if we’re focused on the wrong ones?

Everything in its place. 3.11 is about giving rows, pages, characters and parts the structure they’ve been missing. 📊 A Place for Your Data <wa-data-grid> has arrived as experimental for Pro us...

With visual editing and annotations, Figma Make is bridging the gap between design and code. Select any element you want to change, adjust it directly in the properties panel, or write in-context prom...

Our security team built an AI agent that triages alerts, conducts forensic investigations, queries our security data lake, writes code to fix issues—and remembers what it learns. Here's how we cut ale...

Here’s how Figma’s Brand Studio designed a conference that captured the very human ways we remix and reinvent when working with AI tools.

Welcome back. In Part 1, we made the case for why a visual design system is worth caring about. Now it’s time to get into the actual stuff — the design system components that give your system its look...

For the past year, agents at Figma have guarded code as it's written, reviewed every pull request, and audited a decade-old monorepo, all on one policy.

The conversations we’re still replaying from Config’s Leadership Collective.

The handoff from design to code doesn't have to be a one-way street. This workflow shows how a designer can connect a codebase to Figma Make, make the changes directly, and bring the whole team into r...

While icons on iOS (formerly iPhoneOS) have always been rounded squares, and rounded-square icons have existed on Apple platforms for over 20 years now, Mac app icons have historically exhibited a var...

The fast-growing customer experience platform explains how Figma MCP and Figma Make helped them scale a new design system and keep pace with customer requests.

Part 1: Why Your Brand Needs a Visual Design System In today’s online landscape, a website’s visual identity plays a critical role because everyone knows a great looking site is more than just aesthet...

Drawing on her time at Patreon and Shopify, design leader Jen Dunnam offers her advice for this new age of AI—from building a strong team to how to think about speed.

With accurate first results and fast iterations, OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 gives your builds a strong start in Figma Make.

Last week, Luka and I worked with the hosts of Accidental Tech Podcast—Marco Arment, Casey Liss, and John Siracusa—to design new Liquid Glass icons for their apps. Each submitted their own brief, and...

Read the book, Typographic Firsts I once taught a research/writing class called “No Google” that lasted until it dawned on me that “Google” was indeed the research tool for the 21st century. The reali...

We showed up to Leadership Collective hoping to learn how leaders are guiding their teams through change, what expertise means now, and how they're keeping quality high as the pace picks up. Here's wh...

The way we make things is changing, but why we make them stays constant—the thrill of seeing a vision come to life.

Building on a canvas unlocks performance that a traditional HTML web app can't touch. It also strips away any accessibility the browser gives you for free. Here's how we built it back in.

From sharing your best thinking to learning from your team’s go-to prompts, here’s what skills unlock in the Figma agent.

Saying you use AI responsibly is easy, but proving it to an accredited auditor is harder. We decided that was a standard worth meeting.

New tools and materials make it easier to build anything and start anywhere. The question now is, where do you want to go?

Figma's Season 5 merch is full of surprises—smiling cubes, a tomato with arms, wooden shapes painted in gouache. We asked the eight artists behind the collection how they work, what inspires them, and...