What's in today's newsletter?

1. Your manager is a vampire
2. Join me in London, September 17
3. What happened at Config 2026
4. OpenAI's billboards
5. It's my birthday today!

Got 5 mins? Need your input →

In my first role, the CPO (my boss) spent 3 hours explaining MY designs to the CEO.

While I sat there. In silent.

I felt like a potted plant with a MacBook.

It wasn't months later I realized, in that moment...

I was a pixel pusher
I was a Figma monkey
I was a glorified rectangle mover

Have you ever felt like that? (don’t answer that)

Half of you reading this have a manager who:

• Redoes your work at midnight.
• Needs to approve Every. Single. Pixel.
• Takes credit for your ideas (but somehow the mistakes are always yours).

I call them Vampires 🧛‍♂️

They suck the joy right out of you
They suck the growth right out of you
They suck the creativity right out of you

These managers aren't evil. But they might be broken.

Broken managers overcompensate.
Great managers disappear.

The designers who made it had one thing in common: They all had managers who disappeared.

Not literally (though that would've been nice sometimes). But they got out of the way.

They'd drop a problem in your lap and vanish.
Come back in a week to see the magic.

The designers who hated their work? They got micromanaged into mediocrity.

And micromanagement kills your confidence. Makes you second-guess everything. Turn you into a validation-seeking zombie.

So here's your escape plan:

3 moves I used:

1. Kill the ambiguity

Say: "I'll share v1 on Friday. Testing report next week. Async review in Figma before our sync."

Boom. You just cut their Slack messages by 60%.

2. Find their fear

Ask: "What's your biggest concern with this project?"

Then address it. Directly. Before they ask.

3. Document everything

Not to be petty. But to protect your sanity when you inevitably need to have that conversation with HR.

I've seen talented designers get crushed by scared managers.

Don't be another casualty.

You either prioritize your growth or their insecurity.

Pick one.

If you're getting micromanaged, read this →​

A big thanks to our friends at UserTesting for sponsoring this issue.

For designers who care about the craft — Crafted, 17 September in London 🇬🇧

If you're serious about design, not just shipping but creating work grounded in real customer perspective, this is worth a look.

​Crafted is happening 17 September in London at Exhibition White City.

It’s a curated day for designers thinking about what’s next.

Start with optional morning workshops (paid), including Eli Woolery (Design Better Podcast) on AI + Design Thinking. The focus is on using generative AI to sharpen your creative process.

Or join us for the free afternoon mainstage, where folks at UserTesting and your peers will share perspectives and experiences on:

• How attention, perception, and human connection shape the experiences we design
• Building with AI without losing sight of the customer
• Why the most impactful decisions are still grounded in real human insight

I'll be at the design workshop, if you spot me there, come say hi.

P.S. Use code UXPLAYBOOK for $100 off workshop passes.

Secure Your Spot

So what's went down last week?

The going ons, happenings & shenanigans you might have missed ↓

Figma's 10th Config just wrapped. A stacked release this year, here's everything they announced:

1. Code layers
2. Figma Motion
3. Shader and effects
4. Generative plugins
5. Figma Weave tools
6. Figma agent

1. Code layers

Code now lives directly on the Figma canvas. No more Figma to HTML, we can now turn any design layer into an interactive code layer.

Things are clickable, we can hook it up to real data, we can hold option and drag to branch, and push to GitHub.

I like this execution vs Figma Make. Make sense to be working on the canvas. Hopping back and forth and dealing with a new (chat) interface just didn't make sense to me.

​

2. Figma Motion

This is the big one: create motion directly inside Figma!

Timelines, keyframes, presets, copy animation code directly in CSS, JSON, prompt to generate animations, and more. And of course, export as GIFs and MP4s, which got a HUGE cheer.

The new motion features look insanely powerful. They showed how combining shaders and effects, with animations, make things super unique and come alive.

3. Shader and effects

Create custom shaders in Figma by describing what we want, or use an image as a reference, and Figma agent will build it.

The effect transforms what’s already in the layer, and a fill acts as a new material. Parameters are surfaced as controls, stackable with other effects too.

Figma's also working on interactive shaders, but that's coming soon.

​

4. Generative plugins

I'm most excited for this. Unique tools and workflows we can build directly in Figma!

To build a generative plugin, we just describe the tool we need: the behaviour, the controls and the parameters. Without the need for a local dev environment or plugin API knowledge.

They're rolling out soon, the ability to publish tools to your team, organization or the broader community.

Niche plugins and tools are about to explode. Prediction: Figma Community will be Design's App Store and they'll lean harder on the marketplace business model.

5. Figma Weave tools

Weave is now integrated into Figma. You can build workflows to generate visual assets without going to ChatGPT or Gemini, right on the canvas.

6. Figma agent

Figma agent is available to everyone, allowing us to build skills, use connectors to talk to Notion, Slack, Granola, etc., and bring in attachments.

Most of these are in beta, and use doesn't count to your AI credits. Go play folks. Read the full recap →​

Figma is coming for Adobe. One theme from Config 2026 is unification.

The move of having everything in one place, on the canvas, is how they become the super app of design.

What's got me worried is performance, intuitiveness of switching tools and environment, and whether it'll just be another bloated platform.

Massive FOMO for missing this one again, one day I'll make it in-person.

OpenAI billboards. Their creative team really cooked. Can be seen in NY, LA, Detroit, Chicago.

I wonder if anyone saw this and immediately upgraded their ChatGPT 🤔

Writing this to you on my birthday today. Spending the week in Penang, Malaysia 🇲🇾

Some facts I just learned while being here:

• It only takes 2 hours to drive around the island
• Home to one of the longest bridges in the world
• George Town is ranked among SE Asia’s best cities to retire

Wait, am I that old?

Another year and I'm so thankful for having being so lucky to do what I do. It's kinda crazy.

Because you, the person reading this, it's a reality. Thank you so much for sticking around.

More travelling from this month onwards. Locations: London 🇬🇧, Berlin 🇩🇪, Valencia and Barcelona 🇪🇸, Danang 🇻🇳, Shanghai and Guangzhou 🇨🇳 , maybe more.

I'll let you know where I end up, maybe we can organise an in-person rectangles meetup! If you'll like to help me organise, lmk.

That's it for today.

Speak soon 💛
— Chris
​rectangles.fm​