Paper MCP and Framer MCP
Notion Agent and Perplexity Computer
Notion officially launched Custom Agents this week — essentially letting you cultivate a fleet of "AI coworkers" inside Notion. These agents run 24/7, plugging into Slack, email, calendar, Figma, Linear, even your own MCP servers. Ramp already has 300+ agents running internally, one called "Product Oracle" answering dozens of product questions daily. Many teams genuinely spend their days answering the same questions, writing the same status updates, doing the same task routing. Notion's thesis is clear: hand the standardizable work to agents, free people for what only people can do. Notion still has real value here — people have migrated to Obsidian, but Obsidian is the Linux of note-taking: everything requires manual setup.
Perplexity, quiet for a while, launched its Computer feature — AI directly operating your machine to build application prototypes. Looks very much like Manus; essentially an enterprise-grade OpenClaw. Ryan Putnam used it to build a retro Mac-style ASCII Paint app with impressive design and polish. We may truly no longer need programming — a powerful enough agent can build any product.
Paper MCP and Framer MCP
Paper's desktop app finally shipped after a beta period. It comes with a new MCP server supporting read/write access to design files, connecting to Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, and more. Because Paper is built on web technologies at its core, and LLMs are naturally fluent with DOM structures, the output quality is genuinely good. Ridd shared his aha moment with Paper, and people are saying: Paper is doing to Figma what Figma once did to Sketch.
Framer — unclear what they've been doing all year, their previous AI features went nowhere — then Tommy D. Rossi built a Framer MCP plugin that perfectly solves the Framer-to-Claude/Cursor integration story. You can use natural language to edit copy, adjust styles, build components, even export Framer components as React code. Same idea as Paper: let AI summarize your design files and modify them directly. The good days are here.
Is the Design Process Dead?
Claude's head of design, Jenny Wen, appeared on Lenny's Podcast. The title: "The design process is dead." She's not saying design doesn't matter — she's saying the textbook "research, diverge, converge, mockup, handoff" flow can't hold up anymore. Her core observation: engineers now run seven Claude agents simultaneously, shipping at insane velocity. Designers still following the old step-by-step process simply can't keep pace. So she split design work into two tracks: one follows the engineering rhythm doing execution support and polish; the other does 3-to-6-month short-range direction setting — not the old two-to-three-year vision decks, but prototypes that guide teams toward a direction. She says 30-40% of her time now goes to producing designs, another 30-40% to pair-collaborating with engineers, and the rest to writing code and polishing. A few years ago, producing designs was 60-70%. The shift is massive.
Resources
Vercel Identicon Prototypes
Vercel Labs' Identicon avatar design project using OKLCH dither algorithms to generate unique user avatars. The expanded design variants look stunning — this kind of project really can't just be vibe-coded into existence by anyone.
Curater
An inspiration collection site for discovering taste. Beautifully designed.
Gradient Strips
Framer premium gradient stripe background component with multiple shape, color, and animation options.
More Resources
- ColorFlow - Advanced mesh gradient generator and editor. https://colorflow.ls.graphics/
- Skiper UI - Unconventional interaction components for shadcn/ui, including image reveal, drag scroll, dynamic island effects, and more. https://skiper-ui.com/
- Phaser PixUI - Open-source pixel-art UI library for the Phaser game engine with responsive components and integer scaling. https://skhoroshavin.itch.io/phaser-pixui
- Pinhead Map Icons - 1,000+ public domain vector map icons in a unified style, legible at pinpoint sizes. https://pinhead.ink/
- monochrome - Framework-agnostic accessible UI component library, just 2.2kB of vanilla JavaScript. https://monochrome.sh/
- Font Review Journal - A typeface criticism magazine with deep dives on Agipo, Windsor, Apercu, and more. https://fontreviewjournal.com/
- Resistenza Type: Onni - A contemporary geometric sans-serif from Helsinki, 10 weights, blending Swiss modernist precision with experimental typographic playfulness. https://www.rsztype.com/fonts/onni
Cases
Relace
Nick Pattison crafted an entirely new brand for Relace, fusing American adventure aesthetics with 1960s science book illustrations. Ever since his celebratory brand design for Lovable, major AI products have been lining up. Though this one carries a noticeable Cursor flavor, doesn't it?
Better Auth
The new Better Auth site looks fantastic. Hard to tell whether the founder did it solo or had a designer involved.
ToDesktop
Full lifecycle infrastructure for Electron apps. The new site isn't drowning in detail, but that Turkish design studio consistently delivers quality.
UNMS Brand
Every product under the UNMS umbrella is well-designed. The new brand page has real character — and yes, one person did everything from design to product development.
Curated, translated, and edited from 丁一's DEX Weekly. Ding Yi is the co-founder of DEX, a design community. Former Head of Sketch China, former Design Director at 36Kr. A full-stack designer who writes questionable code, currently freelancing — probably Beijing's most well-known slash-career creative.