Figma Motion Now Ships Audio, Lottie, and Reusable Animation Styles
Figma's Motion tool has expanded significantly with this release, becoming more reusable, expressive, and portable — giving teams a faster path from first keyframe to polished, handoff-ready animations. You can now save animation styles with custom easing, duration, and variable-backed properties, apply them across designs, and publish them to your libraries so every file draws from the same shared sets. You can also drag an audio file onto any motion clip or timeline, trim, split, and reposition audio against your keyframes — then export it alongside your animation in MP4 and WebM formats, or as a Lottie or dotLottie file.
Design Strategy Is the Brief Before the Brief
Goran Paun, Principal and Creative Director of ArtVersion — a firm he founded in 1999 that has grown into a full-service, award-winning design consultancy — published a piece in Fast Company arguing that design strategy sits between broad business objectives and execution. Before there is a new interface, identity, campaign, or website, you must first set the goal of what the design needs to communicate — and understand which problems matter most and where change will have the greatest effect. Without that, design may be addressing the wrong thing entirely.
Pixar's Stop-Motion "Fruit & Nut" Proves Handcraft Is a Flex, Not a Fallback
Pixar has released *Fruit & Nut*, a seven-minute artist short described as "the untold story of the most famous duo of all time," directed by Pixar artists Rej Bourdages and Tony Maki — who previously worked on *Coco*, *Soul*, *Inside Out 2*, *Elio*, and *Hoppers*. The film uses handcrafted stop-motion animation with tangible puppets and sets, combined with 2D animation sequences, producing a quirky indie look that is strikingly different from Pixar's signature 3D CGI feature films. It is only the second stop-motion film Pixar has released, following the experimental short *Self* in 2024.
The Moccamaster KBG: 52 Years of a Design That Never Needed Fixing
Creative Bloq's Design of the Day spotlight, published on International Coffee Day (October 1), focused on the Moccamaster KBG — a filter coffee machine that has been handmade by Technivorm in Amerongen, Netherlands, since 1968. The KBG model was introduced in 1974 and has undergone few design changes since — and the launch was so successful that the Technivorm factory was redirected to focus exclusively on producing Moccamaster brewers to keep up with growing demand. The piece is a timely reminder that the most lasting product design is the kind that solves a problem so thoroughly it never needs a sequel.
How Perfect Storm Turned a Corporate Pet-Tech Brand Into Something You'd Actually Love
Leeds-based agency Perfect Storm has rebranded pet location company identibase as *identi* — the old brand was described as professional and clean but "feeling increasingly corporate and stale" in a crowded market. The new identity integrates a striking colour palette anchored by "identi indigo," "paw pad pink," and "Biscuit," paired with people- and pet-led photography — while the logo cleverly functions both as an animal muzzle and a typical map marker. The shorter name, new identity, and warmer tone were created to make the brand feel simpler, more accessible, and more reflective of the care behind identi's work.
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5 stories · under 10 minutes. See you tomorrow.
TODAY’S THREADEvery story this week is about the same thing: **reducing friction between intent and feeling.** Figma Motion lets animation intent travel instantly across a whole design system. Goran Paun argues design only works when it starts from a clear human intent. Pixar chose the friction of hand-built puppets *on purpose* to make you *feel* something different. The Moccamaster endures because its intent — brew great coffee, look timeless — was never diluted. And Perfect Storm rebuilt identi so the brand's warmth finally matches the care behind the product. The skill that connects all of this? Knowing what you're trying to change before you open a single tool.