Price increase. Figma’s first designer. Design systems Q&A.
Hi friends,
I’m in the middle of two significant milestones with Figmalion. Last month marked 5 years since I sent the 1st issue in November of 2019, and I hope to send the 200th sometime in February. Figma and design tools changed a lot in these 5 years — remember the world before Config, Figma Community, FigJam, variables, AI, or Framer? I’m grateful for the opportunity to write about these topics year after year and get to know so many of you who shape the design community daily.
This is the last newsletter this year; the next one will come out mid-January. I’m taking a winter break to recharge my batteries and travel to spend the holidays with my family. Wishing you happy holidays and a joyful New Year!
— Eugene Fedorenko
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Release Notes
Changes to billing on March 11th, 2025
Figma will raise prices and change the billing experience next year, as explained by Tom Lowry. (My heart goes out to him for being the face of this change.) The cost of the Professional plan goes up by 33% from $15/month or $144/year to $20/month or $192/year. (Consider switching to the annual billing before the price goes up!) The seat on the Organization plan increased by 22% from $540 to $660 per year (the cost of the Dev Mode seat didn’t change), and on the Enterprise plan by 20% from $900 to $1,080.
To soften the blow, all paid seats now include FigJam and Slides. The Dev seat became available on the Professional plan for $15/m or $144/year (the cost of the Full seat before the price increase). Slides is now bundled with FigJam on the new Collab seat, available for $5/month or $36/year on the Professional plan and $60/year on other plans.
The new admin experience finally provides an upfront control of how users get upgraded. Later next year, they plan to roll out Connected Projects announced at Config, so freelancers and agencies won’t need to pay twice for seats.
Updates to our pricing, seats, and billing experience
The official announcement and walkthrough of changes.
What’s New
Andrei Herasimchuk — The 1st designer at Adobe
Ridd interviewed Andrei Herasimchuk, who had one of the most enviable design careers as an interface designer of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and later the first designer at Figma, with stints at Twitter, Yahoo, and Booking in between. I’ve been following him since the Adobe days, but I had no idea he also contributed to Figma early on!
Design Systems Q&A
Molly Hellmuth had Brad Frost, author of Atomic Design, as a special guest at one of the recent cohorts of her Design System Bootcamp course. Molly’s students asked him so many great questions that after the Q&A, he recorded a video answering them again for a wider audience. Topics include design systems, workflow, atomic design, the future of design systems, buy-in, designer-developer collaboration, personal development, and global design system stuff.
The next cohort of Molly’s 5‑week course starts on January 13th, which is the last scheduled cohort for now. Molly generously offers Figmalion readers $100 off with the coupon code FIGMALION100.
Using Figma
Figma files at Figma
Jay from Sneak Peek asked Tim Van Damme (UI3), Tammy Taabassum (AI), and Kelly Li from Figma to share their working projects and walk him through their file organization. Tim had one of the most humble takes on the design collaboration and process.
File organization matrix
Yann-Edern Gillet from Linear shows how he organizes Figma files into a matrix consisting of Components, Inspirations, Playground, and Ready for Dev areas. Raphael Schaad originally recommended this approach in his Config talk From paper to pixels.
Guess the exact number of layers
Brett offers to send an Apple Studio Display to someone who guesses the exact number of layers he used in an illustration. My guess is 999,999.