They Canceled Figma 4 Months Ago. Here's What They Use Now.

By Designer Tom

Categories: Design, Product

Summary

Paper, a design tool, now integrates with AI agents, enabling designers to prompt their production website, pull styles, and ship back designs in one tool. The founder believes the future of building requires three tools: an agent, a code review tool, and a canvas - and Paper aims to be the obvious choice for the canvas.

Key Takeaways

  1. Paper integrates with any AI agent like Codex or Cursor, allowing designers to connect their canvas to their codebase and create a full design-dev-design loop.
  2. Spatial reasoning and manual control are still important, even with AI-powered prompting - Paper aims to bring the canvas experience up to speed with developer workflows.
  3. Leading designers like Quarter and Stripe are already using Paper for both graphics and UI design, showing its relevance for high-quality, craft-focused work.
  4. The founder believes the future of building requires 3 tools: an agent, a code review tool, and a canvas - and Paper wants to be the obvious choice for the canvas.
  5. Figma's walled garden approach is seen as a liability, as designers and developers need more open, integrated tools to keep up with the speed of prompting and cloud code.
  6. Paper recently shipped MCP support, allowing the design canvas to directly communicate with AI tools for enhanced workflows and productivity.

Topics

Transcript Excerpt

Stephen Haney has been building design tools for a while now. Radics, modules, and now paper, which started as this beautiful graphics tool that teams like Quarter were using to create these viral posters. We recorded a version of this conversation 9 months ago, but so much has changed in the design tool space, I decided to sit down with him last week to talk about it. And today, Paper just shipped MCP support, which means that now your design canvas can talk to your AI tools, Cloud Code, Cursor...