Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of the Verge, talked to Dylan Field in a live interview from SXSW about life after the failed Adobe deal, the new multi-edit and Dev Mode, generative AI, the state of the web, design trends, solarpunk, and what comes next. Nilay is a great interviewer, so I highly recommend reading (or listening!) this conversation.

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.

Dylan Field: ​“Figma and Adobe have reached a joint decision to end our pending acquisition. It’s not the outcome we had hoped for, but despite thousands of hours spent with regulators around the world detailing differences between our businesses, our products, and the markets we serve, we no longer see a path toward regulatory approval of the deal.”

Harry McCracken published a big story about Figma and Dylan Field at Fast Company. It talks about Adobe’s acquisition and what it could mean for both companies, the future of design in the era of AI, the origin story of Figma, and their big ambition to ​“make creativity the new productivity”. 

Dylan Field, founder and CEO of Figma, looks at the relationship between designers, developers, and AI, in conversation with a16z’s David George. In the process, he also demoes Jambot, their new AI widget for FigJam. Love this quote from Dylan: ​“It [AI] will lower the floor for who’s able to participate in the design process, but also raise the ceiling of what you can actually do.”

Figma, but for architects: ​“Arcol is a design and documentation tool that helps AEC teams create better buildings, faster.” Backed by Dylan Field as one of the investors. (Hat tip to Jon Moore.)

Great summary of Brian Chesky’s conversation with Dylan Field on approaching everything at Airbnb through a design lens.

Dylan’s recap of all the updates from the keynote, in a brand-new blog. ​“Our vision is to build a new kind of design tool — one that is designed for the entire product development team. Today’s launches reimagine how design and development come together in Figma. I’m excited to introduce three ways we’re doing this: making developers feel at home in Figma with Dev Mode, connecting design to the language of code with variables, and putting a step in between a 2D design and a shipped product with advanced prototyping.”

If you have time for only one thing this week, this should be it. First, Figma CEO Dylan Field introduces new features — variables, auto layout updates, and advanced prototyping. Then, CTO Kris Rasmussen talks about rethinking product building from the ground up and how the new Dev Mode is bringing design and engineering closer together. In the end, Dylan talks about file browser refresh, font previews, and what AI could look like in Figma — wrapping things up by announcing the acquisition of Diagram.

I watched every Config keynote over the years, and this year’s announcements were the most anticipated and ambitious ever. It’s incredible to see how Figma is growing in depth and breadth at the same time, now providing incredibly advanced tools while covering an entire product-building process from brainstorming to design to development. Exciting time to be a maker.

Video and transcript of a fireside chat with Dylan Field on Figma’s origins, AI, and education.

Dylan Field shares his thoughts on ​“Neopets, early MySpace collabs with Eric Lu, the importance of asking ​‘why now’ when building new products, the future of web development and the future”.

Nilay Patel from The Verge interviews Dylan Field for the Decoder podcast. It’s the longest and sharpest interview since the acquisition — an absolute must-read. ​“So I wanted to talk to Dylan about the deal, why he’s doing it, how he made the decision to sell, and what things he can do as part of Adobe that he couldn’t do as an independent company. Dylan’s also a pretty expansive thinker, so after we talked about his company getting the ​“fuck you” money from Adobe, we talked about making VR Figma for the metaverse and AGI, which is artificial general intelligence, or the kind of AI that can fully think for itself.”

Casey Newton interviews Dylan Field about antitrust issues, keeping control of his product road map, and whatever DALL‑E and other AI tools might mean for the future of design.

Andrei Herasimchuk, the ex-Lead Designer at Adobe, shares a list of ​“big wins” and ​“small wins” that Figma cofounders and he wrote down in December 2013. Pretty amazing to see how almost all of it is a reality now. (“Modernizing masking & gradient UI” sounds pretty sweet though!)

Adobe representative to Protocol: ​“While we have been reducing our investment in XD, we will continue to support it. We are excited about Figma’s vision for the future of product design and the potential of our teams coming together to benefit our customers. After the transaction closes (expected in 2023), we will share more information.” RIP XD.

Adam Nash, one of the early investors in Figma, remembers his conversation with Dylan Field in 2013 about WebGL and moving graphic design to the cloud: ​“Dylan was not deterred. He explained that the heavy compute was the exact reason why moving to the cloud made sense. By providing high powered machines in the cloud, anyone could get access to an almost arbitrary amount of power without spending $10K, and latency & bandwidth had progressed to the point where shipping the UI bits to the client was a solved problem.”

The official announcement from Dylan Field.

“Cloud 100 leaders from Algolia, Figma, Gong​.io, and Papaya Global share their stories from the trenches as they offer both strategic and tactical advice to founders on building enduring businesses.”

To celebrate 10 years of Figma, Dylan Field shares 10 physical objects from Figma’s history that are special to him. The beta notebook and WebGL coffee table are my favorites!

Figma CEO Dylan Field kicked off Config 2022 with opening remarks and the launch of 15 new features, ranging from favoriting files to a new version of Auto Layout. At this point, I’m more excited about Dylan’s keynotes than Apple’s. Love how every Config makes our lives better by addressing real problems and small annoyances.