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.”
Coming soon: “An AI assistant that does the boring stuff for you. MATE supports you in your small boring tasks, allowing you to focus on the not boring things. Ask it to rearrange elements, create a color palette, change the stroke for hundreds of items, apply random opacity to selected items, rename variables, and much more.”
Ana Boyer helps design system teams ensure designers get library updates not by copying main components into their working files.
Noah Jacobus from Font Awesome shows how to preserve monotone and duotone icon overrides by maintaining consistent layer names and using boolean unions.
A retrospective on an issue with Make Designs from Noah Levin, a VP of Design at Figma. First, a reminder on how the feature works: “[…] Make Designs feature employs three parts: a model, some context, and a prompt. This feature currently uses a collection of off-the-shelf models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Amazon’s Titan model—the same generally available models that anyone can use—and we have not done any additional training or fine-tuning. To give the model enough freedom to compose designs from a wide variety of domains, we commissioned two extensive design systems (one for mobile and one for desktop) with hundreds of components, as well as examples of different ways these components can be assembled to guide the output.”
What went wrong: “We carefully reviewed the underlying design systems throughout the course of development and during a private beta. But in the week leading up to Config, new components and example screens were added that we simply didn’t vet carefully enough. A few of those assets were similar to aspects of real world applications, and appeared in the output of the feature with certain prompts.”
Artiom Dashinsky asked a lawyer to check how Figma AI affects his work’s copyright. The good part: “You own the copyright for your work. You also own the copyright for the work Figma generates for you with AI.” The bad part: “Let’s say you create a mood board with screenshots of others’ designs. You don’t own the copyright for these designs, but now you’ve allowed Figma to train their AI on it. Now you’ve violated the copyright of the original owner.”
Ridd noticed that designers who can code spend more time sketching their ideas and less time in Figma. This approach isn’t common because it still takes too long to code designs, but AI will change that. What if instead of generating polished mockups from text prompts we used AI to turn wireframes into frontend code, applied our design system, and tweaked the visual direction based on the provided mood board? (This is just one of the ideas explored in the new section of Dive.)
Benji Taylor on creating guiding principles and designing interactions for the Family crypto wallet app: “This is not a technical post or tutorial. There are many good resources about how to craft smooth animations or design pixel perfect UI, by people much smarter than I am. This is about how we made something complex feel welcoming. It’s about what makes Family feel familiar.”
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.
Building a Figma plugin with a server side and API calls in 2 hours using Claude AI.
Rogie King has another example of roughening up icons for wireframes.
Luis brings up an interesting point about optical spacing and bounding boxes of icons. That’s been bugging me as well, but I don’t think there is a universal solution besides creating two sets of icons for vertical and horizontal alignment, which feels like an overkill for most systems.
If one Config wasn’t enough for you, here is a second one-day event at the Asia Pacific region, “full of keynotes, sessions, and programming designed to connect a dynamic community of builders to the future of product design & development.” Most of the talks were unique to this event.
Design Systems WTF podcast from zeroheight: “AI tools are transforming the landscape, making it easier than ever to create and design. Is this making everyone a designer? Will design system makers have to herd even more cats? We’ll be joined by special guest Pablo Stanley, the brilliant co-founder of two AI-based design tools, Musho and Lummi. We’ll unpack the potential of AI-based design tools and some risks. Join us for a lively conversation filled with spicy takes about how AI is reshaping the boundaries of design.”
Abdus Salam, Product Designer at Meta, writes at UX Collective: “The future belongs to designers who can master AI, not be mastered by it. Our value lies not just in our technical skills, but in our creativity, our empathy, and our ability to wield these tools in service of crafting experiences that resonate on a profoundly human level.” Also: “while AI can help us reach “good”, achieving “great” still requires human ingenuity and an unwavering commitment to quality.”
Mia Blume from Designing with AI with a controversial take: “In fact, I think Figma AI changes nothing for design. […] Besides the immediately useful feature of smart naming, Figma AI doesn’t alter the existing trajectory. This isn’t a dig on Figma, or its role in the future of tooling. It’s more that as a discipline, we were already “here”—some people just didn’t realize it.” If you’ve been paying attention to AI-related links in this newsletter, you would agree with her points.
Bingo: “The real weakness that jeopardizes our field has existed long before the invention of generative AI tools for creatives. If our value (even if it’s only perceived) lies solely in drawing boxes, then we will inevitably become obsolete. And if we remain focused on the wrong things, we will miss the moment in which we could do something about it.” In the end, she suggests three key areas that design leaders can focus on.
In this episode of Dive recorded at Config, Ridd talks to Figma design engineer Vincent van der Meulen about how the new Visual Search feature was born from a mid-project pivot. Don’t miss Vincent’s original pitch video for visual search in Figma.
Jordan Singer shared the original pitch deck and a video recording for Diagram (acquired by Figma last year).
The beautifully made radio control panel by Yang You, inspired by the Art of Noise exhibit at the SFMOMA. (I also visited it after the second day of Config, and seeing these cult objects by Dieter Rams and teenage engineering in person was a remarkable experience.)
Vijay Verma shows how “Figma Slides” illustrations were made.