WebGPU, Code on Canvas, and Figma's Relentless Week

Figma↗ shipped five separate things between Monday and Friday: desktop app navigation improvements, voice-to-text in Make, text-on-a-path and new brush controls in Draw, architecture diagram generation via MCP in FigJam, and Figma↗ Weave workflow templates in Community. The cadence is relentless in a way that seems increasingly deliberate. If you can do everything inside Figma↗, you stop looking.

Plate is a browser-native motion design tool built on WebGPU. It's v0↗.1.0 alpha, Chrome only, but it does something After Effects can't: GPU-accelerated motion graphics in a browser tab, no install required, no CPU roundtrip. The team published a full walkthrough this week. If you do motion work, or you're watching what WebGPU unlocks for creative software, that walkthrough is worth your time.

Pencil↗ added Code on Canvas. Drop a Script node onto the canvas, point it at a JavaScript file, and the output renders as live Pencil↗ layers — grids, charts, patterns, whatever your code produces. Design token variables feed in as inputs, and the canvas updates when you save in your editor. If you maintain a design system, you can now generate spec'd visuals directly from the same variables your engineers use. The canvas and the codebase stay in sync without anyone having to remember to update screenshots.

Avnac↗ is gaining momentum as an open-source, local-first Canva alternative. It's a browser design editor — posters, social graphics, layout work — with a vector board that users report as clean and fast. The code is on GitHub, there's a native desktop version built in Go, and design data stays on your machine by default. It won't replace Canva for teams. It answers a different question: what if the files were actually yours?