Happy birthday to my favorite design tool!

I’m always curious about how Figma’s engineering team operates at scale: ​“Migrating onto Kubernetes can take years. Here’s why we decided it was worth undertaking, and how we moved a majority of our core services in less than 12 months, all while making our compute platform easier to use.”

A behind-the-scenes look into the journey of launching Figma Slides. As Mihika noted, this talk could be considered the other half of her podcast with Lenny on building zero-to-one products from a few months ago.

The new Figma homepage, this time designed with a custom Figma Sans typeface. (I truly hope this redesign was codenamed ​“Figma sans Whyte” internally.)

I got curious about how the Figma brand and messaging changed over the years and went down the rabbit hole of the Wayback Machine. The first available version is from December 2015 — ​“The Collaborative Interface Design Tool.” A year later, it was changed to ​“The first interface design tool with real-time collaboration,” which feels like something Rasmus Andersson would design. It was updated to the ​“Turn Ideas into Products Faster” in April 2017, which was slightly tweaked later that year. The homepage was redesigned again in January 2019 to ​“A better way to design.”

Finally, one of my favorite versions using ABC Whyte typeface and ​“Where teams design together” tagline was launched in October of 2019 and stayed pretty much unchanged until April of 2021 when it was replaced with a mouthful ​“Minds meeting minds is how great ideas meet the world.” This one didn’t stay for too long and gave way to a great tagline, ​“Nothing great is made alone,” in July 2021, which was used for two years until July of 2023, when it was replaced with a more descriptive ​“How you design, align, and build matters. Do it together with Figma.” That was the version that the new homepage replaced.

Bloomberg: ​“An investor group including Coatue Management, Alkeon Capital Management and General Catalyst Partners have invested in Figma Inc. as part of a deal that values the design startup at $12.5 billion, according to people with knowledge of the matter. ¶ The deal comes as the San Francisco-based company is delivering annual recurring revenue of more than $700 million, a figure that is projected to surpass $1 billion by next year, one of the people said, asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public. Yearly recurring revenue stood at about $400 million in late 2022.”

A great example of Figma’s attention to detail in this post from Ryhan on the Dev Mode toggle in the toolbar: ​“Our current logic accomplishes this by waiting for mouseout — so if you’re hovering over the control […], the width will stay constant for a split second longer — just long enough for you to click again to toggle back — without being perceived as ​“slow”. However, if you mouse out immediately, or do this via shortcut, the animation is sped up to be slightly faster, since there is no action to cancel.”

It’s Nice That talks to Damien Correll, Figma’s creative director, and Jessica Svendsen, its design manager, about designing the identity for this year’s Config and the response from the community. ​“The visual identity that goes alongside Config is a ten-month design project completed mainly internally, this year with help from Danish design team Relay on the motion front. Extending Figma’s core shape-based language with transforming glyphs, the branding is colourful, clean and much-hyped.”

See also Crafting the visual identity for Config 2024 at Figma blog.

Jordan Singer shared the original pitch deck and a video recording for Diagram (acquired by Figma last year).

Mihika shares the inspiration and the process of making one of the coolest Slides features.

Design Engineer Vincent van der Meulen explains how it was built.

Designer Marco Cornacchia explains how it works. See also his follow-up thread on why the new Asset Search marks the end of the ​“design graveyard.”

Designer Joel Miller: ​“We’ve reorganized our properties panel to focus on component properties and added the ability to resize the panel to see more of a component description and longer label names.”

He also shows a new approach to layout properties with new Position and Layout panels, the new Auto Layout panel, a new setting that allows you to see labels above controls, and a way to join the waitlist.

Rasmus Andersson was one of the early designers at Figma and greatly impacted how it looked over the years. His thoughts on the redesign: ​“Not a fan of the floating sidebars, the rounded icons or the tiny layer hit targets, but I think pretty much everything else is good.”

Designer Ryhan Hassan shares insights into an incredibly challenging task of redesigning Figma. See also one of the early demos of UI3 from a few years ago.

Tim Van Damme created all the beautiful new icons for the UI3. (In his podcast with Lenny, Dylan Field shared how, in the early days of Figma, he often traced Tim’s icon sets from Dribbble to test Figma’s vector capabilities. Now, his icons have come full circle back to Figma.)

Behind-the-scenes look at how Ryhan Hassan, Joel Miller, and KC Oh landed on a more streamlined and adaptable interface. Don’t miss How we redesigned Figma talk at Config from this group.

On components: ​“As design systems took off and components became central, we realized that component controls like variants and instances deserved top billing above attributes like color and size.”

On streamlined the properties panel: ​“All layout-related options, including width, height, and Auto Layout, are now merged into a single panel. This departs from the typical x, y, w, h panel in most tools, but aligns more neatly with how products are built in code.”

On interface for usability: ​“UI3 introduces backgrounds on inputs, borders around dropdowns, rounded corners, and 200 expressive icons hand-drawn by designer Tim Van Damme. These serve as visual explanations of how to interact with the platform.”

Jordan Singer shares a few things he learned while designing and building AI at Figma.

“Cloud-based designer platform Figma is closing a deal to allow its employees and early investors to sell their stake to new and existing investors at a valuation of $12.5 billion, the company said on Thursday.” Good news for the team. After the Adobe deal was canceled, I assumed they’d do a liquidity event for employees and early investors.

“Figma is widely considered as a candidate to go public after antitrust regulators in Europe and Britain in December blocked what would have been among the biggest acquisitions of a software startup. New investors including Fidelity, Franklin Venture Partners and existing ones such as Sequoia and a16z are expected to acquire stakes totaling about $600 million to $900 million in the secondary sale. Figma was last valued at $10 billion in a private funding round in 2021.”

Designer Advocate Clara is interviewed by Lovers Magazine about her path into design, getting inspiration, community work, and workstation.

A new episode of Lenny’s Podcast with Mihika Kapoor, a design-engineer-PM hybrid at Figma, where she was an early PM on FigJam and is now spearheading development on a new product at the company that’s coming out this June (!!!) ​“She’s known as the go-to person at Figma for leading new 0‑to‑1 products, and, as you’ll hear in our conversation, beloved by everyone she works with. Her background includes founding Design Nation, a national nonprofit focused on democratizing design education for undergraduates; spearheading product launches at Meta; and community building within the NYC AI startup scene.” See also a few key takeaways from this conversation on Twitter.