
VP Design @Figma
San Francisco, CA
Joined November 2008
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Noah Levin retweeted
👋 If you ARE one of the few people thinking about the language and grammar of software interfaces (or design and brand systems, or expressive design) then I would love to tell you about the work we are doing on the model design team at Figma to augment creative workflows!
Replying to @dankuntz
the real answer is simply that very few people have thought about the language or grammar of software interfaces sufficiently to view it as correctly solved problem. And those people are certainly not training LLMs in that way.
Programming has a very obvious headstart in this way.
Noah Levin retweeted
you'll do your best work in a tool that allows you to be whimsical, too!
🔊🔊🔊 — lol i've lost hours building fun stuff like this with code layers…
@figma code layers starting to roll out into open beta TODAY! incredibly excited to see what you'll cook!
Noah Levin retweeted
Did you know about Figma's chrome extension? Well, now you do! And we've improved it!
Press the “capture code” button to create a Code Layer on the canvas :)
This week on Source Material: Ben Ganz shares the books, typography, and visual references that shape his multidisciplinary design practice.
00:14 Andy Warhol’s Index (Book) (Andy Warhol, 1967)
01:10 The Bald Soprano (Eugène Ionesco, Massin, & Henry Cohen, 1965)
01:58 Your Action World: Winners Are Losers with a New Attitude (David Byrne & Stefan Sagmeister, 1999)
03:18 The Forms of Color (Karl Gerstner, 1986)
04:22 Swatch: A Guide for Connoisseurs and Collectors (Frank Edwards, 1998)
04:50 Swatch DaimlerChrysler Set (Swatch, 1998)
05:37 On Aluminium (Michel Majerus, 2017)
06:37 Nest Summer 2001 “Joint Issue” (Joseph Holtzman, 2001)
07:30 Nest Winter 2000/2001 Issue (Joseph Holtzman, 2001)
08:28 High-Tech: The Industrial Style and Source Book for the Home (Joan Kron & Suzanne Slesin, 1978)
09:08 USM NYC by Ben Ganz (USM Haller & Ben Ganz, 2025)
10:24 References & Credits
Figma's Dylan Field says our definition of "slop" keeps silently moving:
"I said, 'AI will lower the floor and raise the ceiling.' And I had to correct myself, because actually that's not what we're seeing yet."
"We're seeing it lower the floor. It's more democratized to do something. But the ceiling doesn't seem to have changed."
"Anything you can verify, AI's great at. Math being number one, maybe cybersecurity number two... You get five designers in a room, they can't agree all the time on exactly what they should do. And that's what's interesting about design. There is not one solution."
"A lot of the stuff that we call slop wouldn't be stuff we'd call slop a month ago or two months ago. As the models change, our definition of slop changes."
"The craft that you imbue into something is reflective of your thinking. It's reflective of your care. People pick up on it. Whether they can articulate it or not, they can tell."
"It creates a lower bound that you have to exceed, but it doesn't define the upper bound. You define the ceiling."
@zoink w/ @sophiadew on @MTSLive
In case you're wondering the Figma MCP does in fact work really well with iOS / MacOS :)
Just ask your agent to drop designs it into a Figma file - and it should create high fidelity views with tokens based on your own tokens etc etc
(ps. the whole buildout was <10m but chopped for tweet sake)
Noah Levin retweeted
as a runner, moving to SF meant improvising a run (as I often did in London/Santa Monica) could send me up a small mountain ... so I built: flattensf.com
Noah Levin retweeted
On September 27, 2016, the Figma web application for collaborative interface design was released.
Noah Levin retweeted
User interfaces are not going away.
Yes, humans will use computers alongside agents. When working with agents, we will need the ability to audit what agents do in a human-readable way.
Yes, some interfaces (ex: dashboards, in-chat UI for ephemeral tasks, etc) will be generated. Most important interfaces will be intentionally designed. We will want both deterministic and non-deterministic interfaces in different situations. We're thinking a lot about the best ways to help designers shape non-deterministic systems at Figma.
Yes, new input modalities like voice, VR/AR and BCI will change the way we use computers and introduce lots of new interaction paradigms. This is all very exciting :)
Overall, the surface area of design will continue to grow much broader. Design is the new code and the key differentiator for software moving forward. Expect more and more energy to go into design / craft in the years ahead... it will be how you win or lose.
Eric is right about plenty of things, but the market will prove him wrong on this one...
"User interfaces are largely going to go away.
Because the agents speak English, or other languages. You can talk to them. You can say what you want. The UI can be generated.
So I can say, generate me a set of buttons that allows me to solve this problem, and it's generated for you."
- Eric Schmidt is the former CEO of Google.
Today’s websites are designed for humans, with carefully crafted UIs.
But we are probably moving towards UI-less web.
automated bot traffic has already surpassed human activity on the web. with AI agents, this number will explode.
In near future its very plausible that 90% or more of web traffic will be non-human.
Imagine a web with no websites. All your favorite apps are now just databases, queried for information by agents that zip around on your behest.
In a world primarily composed of bots, what happens to websites? Do agents learn to navigate them like a human? Do they go away entirely? 🤔
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Video from 'Peter H. Diamandis' YT channel
This week on Source Material: enter the mind of Brent David Freaney — art director & founder of Special Offer.
00:00 Intro
00:36 Interaction of Color (Josef Albers, 1963)
01:19 A Dictionary of Color Combinations (Sanzo Wada, 2010)
01:54 Death of the Finished State (Brent David Freaney, Figma Config 2026)
02:20 Boarding Pass (Emirates, 2025)
03:41 M2 (Takashi Homma, 2011)
04:49 Room Service Menu (Century Hyatt Tokyo, 1980s)
05:59 The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Edward Tufte, 1983)
06:58 The Oppression and Liberation: Or: Homophobia: Its Causes and Cure (Gay Theory Work Group, 1977)
08:12 Is Love Enough? (Bruce Weber, 2005)



















