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UK studios and in-house teams are still hiring for UX and product design, but many are consolidating into smaller, more specialised teams rather than growing large generalist pools. For juniors, that shifts the useful CV story from 'I can do everything' to 'here's my specific strength.'
designweek.co.uk
Practitioners are revisiting the decades-old ten usability heuristics to ask what still holds when AI generates more of the interface. The heuristics themselves aren't obsolete — they're being extended with questions about transparency and trust in AI-driven features.
smashingmagazine.com
More teams are treating W3C-format design tokens, not static style guides, as the actual source of truth between design and code. Penpot's native token support follows the open spec, while Figma's variables remain mostly locked to its own ecosystem.
designsystems.news
Penpot keeps closing the gap on Figma with a free, self-hostable, open-source platform — but it's still not a like-for-like swap. Plugin depth and advanced prototyping still favour Figma for now.
youtube.com
Design-to-code AI agents are moving from novelty demo to occasional daily tool for some teams, turning Figma or Penpot screens into rough working code. It's early and patchy, so treat every output as a first draft, not a shippable component.
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