--- title: "Case Study Club — the weekly read for designers" url: https://stacklist.com/card/82838ad7-5d68-415a-9aaa-f946e6fcb65d source_url: "https://www.casestudy.club/" stack: https://stacklist.com/stack/548bc49f-9b79-4eb9-bc52-e7fb8d2b4694 summary: "Case Study Club is a weekly publication analyzing design trends and tools for product designers, featuring insights on Figma's latest features that bridge design and code. The issue covers Figma's Config 2026 announcements, including code layers and AI integration, alongside curated design resources and tools from the creative industry." tags: "design-tools, figma, ai-integration, product-design, design-trends, creative-industry" key_entities: "Figma (organization), Case Study Club (organization), Config 2026 (event), Cannes Lions 2026 (event), Figma Motion (technology), Ikea Canada (organization), Rapha (organization), Emily Campbell (person), Raymond Biesinger (person), The Last Museum (technology)" classification: "analysis" content_hash: "sha256:74ce6546b9135091f881b482bd81f5bde42d35f28da9f98259621446ea7cffc8" acp_version: "0.2" token_counts_approximate: 1428 visibility: public agent_accessible: true status: "final" --- # Case Study Club — the weekly read for designers CASESTUDY.CLUB A WEEKLY PUBLICATION What's actually moving in design The weekly read for designers who shape products. Signal, not noise. Every Monday. Read it Join 27,200 designers worldwide. Privacy Contact No. 008 ships Monday   CASESTUDY.CLUB No. 008  ·  29 Jun 2026  ·  Vol. III   Case Study Club The weekly read for designers who shape products. Off the grid for two weeks. No issue on 6 or 13 July. Case Study Club is back in your inbox Monday 20 July.   The Case Study ● Figma moves the canvas toward code At Config 2026 last week, Figma finally stopped pretending the canvas and the codebase are separate places. It shipped code layers that let designers write and preview real code on the canvas, next to the static frames. It shipped Figma Motion , a timeline that puts animation in the same file as the components it moves. It added shaders, generative plugins, a Weave integration, and an expanded design agent with custom tools and enough context to read a brand's guidelines instead of inventing generic output. The full recap reads like a positioning play. The position is a defensive one. For a decade the canvas was the place design happened and the handoff to engineering was the seam everyone hated. AI is now closing that seam from the other side. Teams are starting to build interfaces directly in code, with agents generating the first draft, and a tool whose whole value was the picture-of-the-thing has to explain why anyone still needs the picture. Figma's answer is to stop being the picture. The bet running under every Config announcement is that the canvas becomes the place where design intent is decided and then expressed in whatever medium the moment needs, code included. Own the intent layer and it does not matter whether the output ships as a component or a commit. Every serious design tool is converging on the same shape: less drawing, more intent, an agent in the loop, the gap between thinking and making compressed to almost nothing. Figma is moving faster and louder than most because it has the most seats to protect. That is worth watching. A note from the editor. I have watched designers get loyal to their tools. Sketch loyalists who held on past the point of sense, Figma converts who now defend the canvas like it is a personality (maybe they're right). Config 2026 is a useful reminder that none of this is permanent. Tools are being disrupted across the whole stack, and when that happens the best tool wins.   Field Notes ● Cannes Lions 2026 named its Grand Prix winners across every category.   Future London Academy published its Future of Creativity Report in a deliberately retro 1990s web aesthetic.   Ikea Canada rebuilt its flat-pack furniture into national flags for all 32 World Cup teams .   Rapha rebranded with six bespoke typefaces drawn from vintage cycling ephemera.   Raymond Biesinger published an illustrated self-defense guide for creatives after being ripped off nine times.       The Portfolio ● emilycampbell.co   Writing, 2026 Designing AI means working below the interface Emily Campbell writes about AI experience design from the layer most teams skip. Her site collects essays rather than thumbnails, and the latest one makes the case that an AI product is decided in its system logic, constraints, and behavior, long before any screen or wireframe exists. The argument lands because she names the layers. The surface interface is the part users see and the part that obscures the decisions that actually shape outcomes and trust. Read it as a counter to the week's tooling noise: the real work happens under the canvas, in the system logic and the constraints.       The Tool ● lastmuseum.com   Search engine, 2026 Search every museum at once The Last Museum is a search engine for art that queries collections from museums worldwide at once, instead of making you open each institution's database one at a time. Useful for chasing a reference or a precedent across many collections in a single search. It is also quietly damning: the tool has to exist because, after decades of digitization, most museum collections still sit in silos that do not talk to each other. One search box, many museums, and a clear view of how far the cultural web still has to go.   Written and edited by Jan Haaland. Published weekly from Norway. Forwarding this to one person is the best way to support Case Study Club. If someone comes to mind, please send it their way. Issue No. 008 Subscribe  ·  View in browser   Archive 7 back issues No. 007 The wrong thing 2026-06-15 No. 006 The last 10% 2026-06-08 No. 005 Who's doing the thinking? 2026-06-01 No. 004 Figma's second try at agents 2026-05-25 No. 003 Source of truth 2026-05-18 No. 002 Inside Stripe's Protodash 2026-05-11 No. 001 Usability testing is about to have a comeback 2026-05-04 About the author Jan Haaland Hi, I'm Jan. I've been in design for 15 years. Through Web 1.0, Paint Shop Pro to Photoshop to Sketch to Figma, and now AI. I started Case Study Club in 2015 as a newsletter. Ten years later, it's the publication I wish I had when I was trying to figure out what was actually changing in this industry, and what was just noise. Alongside the newsletter I do consulting work that keeps me close to how teams are actually shipping. That's where the signal comes from. If you're on LinkedIn, let's connect . — Jan CASESTUDY.CLUB A WEEKLY PUBLICATION What's actually moving in design The weekly read for designers who shape products. Signal, not noise. Every Monday. Read it Join 27,200 designers worldwide. Privacy Contact No. 008 ships Monday