Happy Friday!

Welcome to TWID - the only design newsletter on the internet written (in a state of borderline despair) by me.

I’m not sure if anyone is even around to read this, considering the year is grinding to a halt and everyone is starting to suggest "circling back” instead of “touching base.”

That said, we have a couple things to discuss. Thanks for being here, let’s get into the sauce 🥫

WK51

Adobe x Figma deal falls through

The news of the abandoned deal was the biggest design bombshell of the week.

Before we get into this – here’s a quick recap for the uninformed. Despite the collective whining of design twitter, Figma entered into a definitive $20B merger agreement with Adobe last September.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your pov), we just learned that the sale will not go through.

Regulators pretty much told Adobe - “hey sorry sweetie, no you can’t have a monopoly on the design software market, xoxo.”

Personally, I don’t think I was going to lose any sleep over either outcome, but I do think that this is a net positive for the design community.

Competition leads to innovation, and based on what we’ve seen from Adobe XD, I don’t think that this would’ve been the most inspiring outcome for the future of design tools.

Both parties claim that the decision to walk away was mutual, but breakups never really are. I do feel for the employees that were expecting a big payday… and while they might not all get new boats, I hope they see at least some of the juicy $1 billion break up fee.

Edible buttons

It seems that every week the design twitter hive-mind finds a new obsession and beats it into the ground (as is tradition).

Naturally, this week was no different.

This time around, we’re fixating on smooth buttons (usually with several layers of drop shadows – because flat design is dead, remember?) And who cares how hard this is to implement, as long as it looks cool it’ll all be worth it in the end.

Jokes aside, that’s a really sexy button.

And of course, no design twitter trend is ever truly complete without a “2 types of designers” post to get the people really going.

✨ This week’s sponsor

Play - A better way to design mobile apps

If you’re designing a mobile app, we’re building Play for you. Play combines a familiar design canvas with the power of Apple’s native iOS elements, access to device hardware, interactions that use Core Animation, and SwiftUI code generated in real-time based on your designs.

Available in the App Store on macOS & iOS.

Spline is multi platform

The latest release from Spline got the entire design community buzzing with excitement, and for good reason.

In this absolutely massive update, Spline shipped the ability to create native 3D scenes and interactions for the entire Apple ecosystem via a no code workflow.

There’s a lot to unpack, so you should probably watch the announcement video to really understand the magnitude of this release.

Oh and you can also just create a native Xcode app directly in Spline now … and then publish it to the App Store. No big deal.

Spline is getting very hard to ignore, and I’m really hyped to see what they ship in the future. Until then, I think it’s safe to say that apps are about to get a lot more 3D, and I’m not mad about it.

FigWig is on the App Store

If you’re active on design twitter, you’re probably at least somewhat familiar with this fun project from Raffi & Neesh.

Developers have been gatekeeping contribution graphs forever, and FigWig is here to finally let designers have some fun, too.

This isn’t sponsored, but I’ve been using the beta for a while now and it’s been really fun. Congrats to the homies for getting it out on the App Store, and I’m excited to see what else they’ve got planned (fingers crossed for drafts support soon 🤞)

Design Dopamine 💊

I feel like I tell you every week that picking a project to highlight in this section is super hard, but that wasn’t the case today.

Fruit stickers 🍏

This week's design dopamine comes from Anzor & Val’s bountiful harvest of fruit stickers from around the world.

I think this project is incredibly fun, and these tiny fruit stickers do a great job of scratching an itch I didn’t know I had.

If you want to check out the collection so far – you can find all 74 stickers here.

That’s a wrap for WK51

Thanks for reading, if you enjoyed this issue (or hated it), please let me know in the comments (or tweet at me).

Also, be sure to check out Play - the sponsor of this week’s issue for a big forehead kiss.

If you have an idea for how I can improve TWID or want to suggest something for next week’s issue, be sure to tag @twidfyi on twitter

Love you all, have a great weekend

- @aleksliving