WWDC, Ideogram's Open Weights, and a Dither Tool
Apple's Liquid Glass kicks off WWDC today. Ideogram 4.0 drops open weights with JSON-structured prompts. Figma ships Check designs and Config is two weeks out. Plus: a small browser tool worth bookmarking.
WWDC kicks off in Cupertino today, and the signals from Apple suggest Liquid Glass is real: a visual overhaul of iOS 27 that resets the aesthetic rules designers have been working with since iOS 16. New materials, new sidebar layouts, new motion patterns. Every design system built around flat iOS components will need updating before the year is out. Worth watching the keynote today.
Last Tuesday, Ideogram released the weights for Ideogram 4.0 on Hugging Face and GitHub. It's a 9.3-billion-parameter single-stream diffusion transformer that runs at native 2K without a separate upscaling step and outputs images with alpha channels by default. What makes it unusual is how it accepts prompts: structured JSON with bounding boxes in 0-1000 coordinates, not sentences. You specify where elements go, and the model honours them. The inference code is Apache 2.0; the model weights carry an Ideogram non-commercial licence, so shipping it in a product needs a separate agreement. For product builders that's a real constraint. For designers experimenting with image-generation in their workflows, it's a serious research tool that runs locally.
Figma↗ has been shipping through May: Make in limited beta for local codebase connection (visual edits write to real files with full git workflow inside Make), the Figma↗ AI agent in beta reading your canvas and operating from your actual components and variables, and Check designs for running design system QA against live files. Config 2026 is June 23-25 in San Francisco, and there's clearly more to come.
Framer↗ has something planned for June 16. Live event, no details. They've had a strong year (CMS 3.0, AI page generation, $2B valuation) and the announcement should be worth watching.
Small tool worth bookmarking: Ditther is a free, no-login browser editor for dither, halftone, bayer matrix, lego, and pixel effects. Runs entirely in the browser, no account needed, genuinely enjoyable if you work with photography or texture in UI.