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.

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.”

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

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.

Michael Mignano talks to Jordan Singer, AI lead at Figma and former Founder & CEO of Diagram. They covered the role of human designers in AI, what it’s like building AI features for the world’s leading product design platform, Jordan’s path from coder to designer to product builder to founder, and much more.

This April Fun Day, Figma had some fun with cursors. ​“What better way to celebrate this icon of interaction than with a look back at digital eras through the decades? For one week starting this April Fun Day, you’ll be able to choose throwback cursors inspired by four aesthetics from internet history: We’re calling them 8‑bit, Y2K, Skeuomorphic, and Aero. Here, we reminisce about bygone trends and reveal how we brought these vintages back to life.”

“Researcher Gus Griffin recently completed one year on artificial intelligence work at Figma. In this conversation with Figma’s Head of Insights, Andrew Hogan, Gus walks through AI feature fatigue, what people really want from artificial intelligence, and how his anthropology background helps him do his work.”

“Inspired by the Figma design team’s principles and methods for running design crits, a core group of Figma engineers, led by Ojan Vafai, set out to introduce a process somewhere in between a design crit and a technical review. This was the genesis of Figma’s engineering critiques, dedicated time for the engineering team to brainstorm novel approaches to technical problems, get feedback on existing work, and unblock each other. Today, engineering crits are a core part of our workflow, but it didn’t start out that way.”

In this episode of the Designing with AI podcast, Mia Blume chatted with Noah Levin, VP of Product Design at Figma, about the emotional ups and downs of the recent acquisition announcement and how it impacted the team, explored the implications of artificial intelligence on creativity and curiosity, leading teams through times of change and learning, decision-making, democratized access to information, and even the concept of love.

Dylan Field joins Sarah and Elad at No Priors podcast to discuss what’s next for an independent Figma, how AI can augment design and speed up the iteration loop, and how Figma is expanding beyond design with products that help the entire product team’s workflow.