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.

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!

Dylan Field talks about startups and European regulation on stage at Slush 2024.

Designer Advocate Ana Boyer: ​“UI3 prompted us to rebuild our own design system from the ground up. Here’s how designers and engineers came together to create a new foundation for building consistent, accessible products.”

Figma is opening an office in Sydney, its first in Australia: ​“The​opening of Figma’s Sydney office builds on​Figma’s​impact in Australia and will help deepen relationships​with its growing local community and key​customers​, such as Telstra​and Atlassian, who is also a Figma integration partner and investor. ”

Mihika Kapoor and Yuhki Yamashita gave a talk at the Lenny and Friends Summit on doing product reviews the right way. While I look forward to watching the full video when it’s available, the slides are pretty comprehensive. They point out that the main goal of product reviews is not making decisions but winning trust.

Claire Butler, a marketing lead at Figma, shares three principles that help market to designers or other groups of passionate experts. Make sure to watch the video she is referring to.

I furiously nodded while reading her second lesson: ​“If you can come up with and understand all of the content, you haven’t gone deep enough. Whatever you are doing will come across too generic, and thus will not resonate. They’ll sniff you out.”

Jenny Xie interviewed Marcin Wichary, Joel Miller, Ryhan Hassan, and KC Oh about the new Figma UI: ​“Our goal with UI3 is to keep designers in the flow by minimizing distractions and placing their work center stage. With that north star in mind, our team worked for over two years, iterating on myriad approaches — even reversing some core design decisions, like the floating navigation and properties panels, after launch.”

“Collaborative-design software maker Figma Inc. accused competitors of breaching a contract and copyright infringement by stealing its source code. Singapore-based Motiff Pte. Ltd., along with Chinese companies Yuanfudao HK Ltd. and Kanyun Holding Group Co., accessed Figma’s product under a subscription agreement and reverse engineered its copyrighted code for their own product in violation of Figma’s Master Subscription Agreement, according to a complaint filed Monday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.“

The court document includes a fascinating list of examples.

Fast Company on Figma’s rebrand: ​”Today, the company is launching a refreshed visual identity that represents its growing, post-Adobe breakup ambitions to be, well, just about everything. Figma’s been making moves to expand beyond its founding idea of being being a single product company for designers, to a multi-product company for multi-role creative teams. Now, the company’s refreshed brand is catching up and speaking to an expanded audience that includes developers and supporting team members like project managers, who help bring a design deliverable to life.”

Olivia Hingley for It’s Nice That: ​“Sitting at the core of the concept is a new brand idea: ​‘build by design’. Short and sweet, the idea reinstates that design is more than just a skill, department or process, it’s the ​“gravitational centre” of the brand. Three brand beliefs come from this idea: ​‘design is everyone’s business’, which speaks to the flexibility and broad nature of design, while the second, ​‘craft as a differentiator’, centers on the care and attention to detail that Figma propagates. […] And, the third and final belief is ​‘the idea is just the beginning’.”

I love how Figma showcased the community work on a giant screen at Times Square.

A deep dive into Figma’s brand refresh. ​“Figma’s visual identity has gotten a bold refresh. From playful primitives to a vibrant new palette, we’re unveiling our latest brand evolution — one that speaks to all product builders.” 

Last June, Figma acquired Diagram — one of the most promising startups building at the intersection of design and AI. Their small team of five joined Figma to build the AI features announced at this year’s Config.

During the last few weeks, 3 out of 5 ex-Diagram teammates left Figma. Founding Engineer Sidd announced his departure first and soon joined Vercel to work on v0. Founder & CEO Jordan Singer and Founding Product Designer Marco Cornacchia announced their resignations on the same day. I’ll be keeping an eye on Design Engineer Vincent van der Meulen and ML Engineer Andrew Pouliot.

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.”