Figma's Biggest Updates in May 2026: Custom Skills, AI Make, FigJam MCP & More

If you haven't checked Figma's release notes recently, you've missed a lot. The last few weeks have brought some genuinely useful updates — not just flashy announcements, but the kind of changes that make your day-to-day workflow noticeably faster. Let's go through everything.

Custom Skills in Figma Make — This One's Big

Released May 11, 2026. This is probably the most significant update in this batch.

Custom skills in Make are markdown files where you define your own conventions, workflows, and standards — once. After that, you call them with a slash command in any prompt. That's it. No more repeating yourself every session.

Here's a practical example. Say your team always uses a specific set of sample data in prototypes — company name, fake user profiles, product names. You used to paste that in manually, or type it out, or forget and end up with "Lorem ipsum" in your prototype. Now you create a /insert-sample-data skill once and call it whenever. Make knows exactly what to drop in.

Or think about something more complex — turning a PRD into a prototype. If your product process involves Notion docs and a standard set of component conventions, you can build a /build-from-prd skill that connects to your Notion workspace and follows your exact standards every single time. Not "roughly similar." Exactly right.

Right now each person manages their own skills individually. Figma has confirmed team-wide sharing is coming — which is where this gets really powerful for design teams working at scale.

If you build design systems or work in product teams with repeating workflows, start experimenting with custom skills now. By the time team sharing lands, you'll already have a library of them ready.

FigJam Is Now Your Coding Agent's Whiteboard

This one caught a lot of people off guard — and it's genuinely clever.

FigJam now has full MCP (Model Context Protocol) support, which means coding agents like Claude, Cursor, and others can generate architecture diagrams, ERDs, and flow charts directly into a FigJam board. You don't export from your agent and paste somewhere else. The agent writes to FigJam directly.

The updated generate_diagram tool (remote server only) handles architecture diagrams and entity-relationship diagrams, with connector types built specifically for database relationships. It also supports Mermaid.js — paste any Mermaid code onto the FigJam canvas and it renders as a proper diagram automatically.

There are also two new skills worth knowing:

• figma-use-figjam — a foundational skill that lets your coding agent read and write directly to a FigJam board
• generate-project-plan — turns documents, codebases, and conversations into visual project boards in FigJam

And get_figjam lets your agent summarise an existing board — useful for standup prep, retrospectives, or getting a coding agent up to speed on a project without manually explaining context it could just read.

We've been testing this with a few client projects. The honest take: it saves real time on the "let me just quickly draw the architecture" phase that used to mean opening a new tool, setting up a board, and drawing boxes manually. Now that phase takes about 30 seconds.

New in Make: Voice-to-Text, Question Cards, Version History

This batch from April 30 is more about refinement than reinvention — but each one addresses something that was actually annoying.

Voice-to-text in Make chat. You dictate your prompt, Make transcribes it, and you review the text before it's submitted. Sounds minor. In practice, if you think faster than you type — or you're working on a laptop with a bad keyboard at a coffee shop — this removes a real friction point. The "review before submitting" part matters too. You're not sending a half-formed voice note directly to the AI.

Question cards are interesting. Instead of Make just guessing what you want when your prompt is ambiguous, it now presents structured options — each with a short description of the tradeoff. So if you say "build me a dashboard," it might ask: do you want a data-heavy analytics layout, a simple overview widget style, or an action-focused ops dashboard? Three choices, each explained. You pick one and it moves forward with real clarity.

Version history in Make means every state of your build is tracked and revertible. This was a genuine gap before — if you went down a wrong path, your options were "undo a lot" or "start over." Now you can jump back to any prior state instantly without losing the rest of your work.

Clear context lets you reset your Make session in one click from settings — clears accumulated context without losing your file. Useful when a conversation has gone on so long that Make is pulling in old decisions that no longer apply.

The new Zapier connector is also worth noting. Google Drive, Microsoft Office, Zoom, and 9,000+ other apps now accessible as context sources in Make. That's a significant expansion for teams that live in multiple tools.

Faster File Transitions on Desktop

Small update, genuinely noticeable improvement.

Three things changed in the Figma desktop app (May 1):

• Links open directly in the desktop app on macOS — no browser routing step in the middle
• Files and prototypes preload in the background so they're ready when you arrive
• Search open and recently closed tabs by name from the tab overflow menu

The preloading is the most useful of the three. If you're jumping between multiple files in a review session — which most designers do constantly — that waiting-to-load moment compounds over a day. Preloading quietly eliminates it.

More Ways to Add References for AI Image Generation

This update (April 29) addressed one of the more awkward parts of using Make Image and Edit Image — the reference image flow.

Previously you could only upload reference images. Now:

• Click "Add reference" directly on almost any node on the canvas — images, vectors, frames, components
• Copy/paste into the prompt box from the canvas or from outside Figma
• Drag and drop files into the prompt box

This works across Figma Design, Draw, Buzz, Slides, and FigJam. The canvas-click approach is the one we use most — selecting an existing component or style frame and saying "generate something in this visual language" is now a two-second action instead of an export-upload loop.

Draw Gets More Expressive Controls

Also April 29. If you use Draw regularly, this update is worth sitting with for a few minutes.

The headline features:

• Text on a path tool — dedicated tool to add text to an existing path, or drag on an empty canvas to create text on a circle. Right-click separates text and vector into independent layers after
• Auto layout in Draw — apply it without switching to Design mode
• Sample stroke style — Cmd/Ctrl-click any stroke to copy its colour, weight, and brush style
• Set gradient + blend mode from the toolbelt before you start a stroke
• Independent X/Y noise and texture control for directional stroke effects
• Layers panel now shows component, instance, and text layer types inline — no more guessing what type a layer is

The auto layout in Draw is the one that saves the most context-switching for people who work in Draw heavily. Being able to apply structure without hopping modes keeps your creative flow intact.

FigJam Quality-of-Life Updates

April 28. A collection of small fixes that individually seem minor but together make FigJam noticeably less frustrating:

• Cell merging in tables — merge adjacent cells while preserving content from the upper-left cell
• Text colour in table cells — finally. Distinct text colours per cell
• Improved arrows — wider routing margins, cleaner arrowheads, clearer dashed endpoints
• Drag-to-flip shapes — drag any resize handle across the shape boundary to flip it. Content stays readable
• Recenter button — quickly get back to your work on large canvases
• Default zoom decrease — starts slightly more zoomed out, better board visibility by default
• Template publishing on Professional plans — publish up to 5 templates per team

The drag-to-flip is one of those things that sounds like nothing until you realise how often you used to do a flip the long way. Same with the recenter button on large FigJam boards — if you've ever gotten genuinely lost on a 200-sticky workshop board, you'll understand why this exists.

What This Means for Design Teams in 2026

Stepping back for a second — the pattern across all these releases is clear. Figma is systematically closing the gap between designing and building. Make is getting more structured and repeatable with custom skills. FigJam is connecting to code. Draw is getting closer to a full illustration tool. The desktop app is getting faster.

For product designers and design teams, this is genuinely exciting. The "handoff problem" — the gap between what a designer produces and what a developer can actually use — is getting smaller with every release. And with MCP bringing coding agents directly into FigJam, the tooling for collaborative human-and-AI workflows is maturing fast.

The teams that start building proper skill libraries in Make now — and experiment with the FigJam MCP flows — are going to have a meaningful advantage in six months when these features are more mature and widely adopted.

If your team uses Figma and you haven't had a proper tool review session recently, these releases are a good reason to schedule one. A lot has changed quietly in the last few weeks.

Building a product or redesigning your website and want a team that stays current with the best design tools? Talk to Chulbul Design — we design and build fast, modern websites using the latest design workflows. Free consultation, no pressure.