Last Tuesday, Figma rolled out the new pricing, which was announced in December. The design seats price increased, while Dev Mode seats remained unchanged and all paid seats now include FigJam and Slides. Admins got upfront approval over seat upgrades.

“Figma now transforms common character combinations into smart symbols in all fonts. Now when you type the following characters – ©, ®, ™, ->, <-, vv, ^^, \[ \] – Figma will automatically transform them into smart symbols: ©️, ®️, ™️, →, ← , ↓, ↑, ▢. This will occur with every font, as long as you have the ​“Use smart quotes/​symbols” preference on. Also available in FigJam and Slides.”

Dann Petty has been one of the most vocal Figma critics lately. (See his previous post for some context, or go all the way back to moving drafts drama in the summer.) I don’t think corporations need help defending themselves, but in this case, I see the situation from a different angle and want to share some thoughts.

First, I built my first Framer website recently and thought it was a compelling alternative for designing websites. It often takes me longer to prototype a throw-away interaction in Figma than to do it straight in code (especially with AI!), so designing and animating the actual website instead of a mockup felt refreshing. I missed some of the more advanced features (no variables, really?), but I’m sure they are on the roadmap. In the end, it wasn’t the right tool for this project, but I agree with Dann that similar tools will be ​“owning the web design market”. That said, they have nothing to offer product designers.

Here is the part I disagree with: “(People are) mad at Figma because they lost focus on designers and got over bloated with useless features no one wanted or needed and started to focus on developers and their Config event.” Dann doesn’t specify which features he considers useless, but I assume it’s those related to larger design systems and developer handoff. Personally, I rarely feel restricted while working on visual design, but often hit the wall with a lack of CSS grids, inability to replicate the props.children behavior in components, still incomplete variables support, barebones design system analytics, Dev Mode, prototyping, etc. On my product team engineers outnumber designers 5 to 1, so a lot of our time and attention is spent on cross-team alignment. These features might be useless to freelancers and agencies, but worth their weight in gold to product teams.

Lastly, a note on Figma becoming ​“incredibly expensive.” First, they kept the same $15/​m price of the Professional plan since 2018. According to the CPI Inflation Calculator, $15 in 2018 had the same buying power as $19.31 today — pretty close to $20. Second, at least in the US, $20/​m or $192/​year is not much for a pro tool — some of my streaming and newspaper subscriptions cost more. Third, it now includes two more products! My team just upgraded our Figma account to the Organization plan and it was cheaper to wait for the new pricing as we no longer needed separate licenses for FigJam and Slides. This will not be true for everyone, but not all seats increased in price while getting some perks.

Figma shared new details about connected projects that will launch in the first half of 2025. They let two separate teams or organizations — like an agency and a client — collaborate on a shared project using billable seats from their plans without paying for extra seats. Pro users can connect up to 3 projects, Organization 6 and Enterprise 15. The plan of the team initiating a connected project determines features available to all users collaborating on the project. Resources like shared libraries and fonts can be enabled for everyone.

Nice built-in support for code blocks with syntax highlighting in Slides.

(Read without a paywall.) The New York Times reports: ​“Figma, a cloud-based design platform, has met with investment banks in recent weeks to discuss an initial public offering that could come as soon as this year, two people with knowledge of the matter said.”

Product Marketer Sarah Kelly and Designer Advocate Kaitie Chambers share all the recent launches and introduce a few brand-new features. The Figma team also gives hands-on demos on how to use the new features in your workflow immediately.

Plugins are now available in Figma Slides, and three dozen plugins have already been updated to support it.

“See when teammates and invited guests last visited your Figma files, helping you track engagement and keep projects moving forward.”