Articles

Kavir Kaycee explains why Figma won over the competition from the perspective of the Product Manager. He explains Figma’s success by being collaborative, community-driven, and affordable. I also like his point that Figma might become the starting point for all software development in the future.

Use ⌘-F or Ctrl‑F to trigger the search box. Fantastic update! This is a critical ​“must-have” feature, so I used to rely on Jackie Chui’s popular Find and Replace plugin. Fun fact: Jackie joined Figma and worked on the native feature as well. He’s even got a kind warning from Figma that his plugin is going to become obsolete soon. Love to see this kind of respect for the developers community from Figma.

Earlier this year, Jeremy Dizon led the project to enhance the Lyft Product Language (LPL) Native component library. In this blog post, he talks about the strategy they’ve used, the reason behind incorporating lightweight user research, and some key learnings from this 6‑month long project. Sometimes creating a new version of each component is the right approach, and major updates to Figma features provide a good opportunity for this work.

Andrew Hogan, Insights & Analysis at Figma: ​“We set out to understand why some companies seem to have no problem attracting design talent while others struggle to connect. So, we surveyed and interviewed hundreds of hiring managers and recruiters about their experiences. We wanted to know how they get started courting great talent, and what aspects of company culture are most vital to designer happiness.”

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.

Congrats to the FigJam team! It’s definitely the most fun and delightful product I’ve used in a while.

A piece on why businesses should adopt a design-centric mindset to ensure success, with commentary by Nikolas Klein, Product Designer at Figma since 2018.

Matt Stoller: ​“My instinct is that this merger is illegal and that it will be blocked or abandoned. But I’m not 100% sure, as there are also technical issues here that I’m still trying to wrap my head around. But even within the merging parties, there is genuine concern about whether this merger will close. Internally, Adobe executives are already telling employees not to write anything down about the merger for fear it will be found by government investigators.”

The Wall Street Journal gathered thoughts and concerns on the deal from folks in the industry, including Scott Belsky, Fons Mans, and Yuhki Yamashita.

Index Ventures is Figma’s first and largest venture partner. In this post, Danny Rimer questions what makes Figma so special and talks about the generational significance of design thinking and Dylan’s focus on the community.

Joey Banks explains why new features are so important for the design systems’ work.

New component property features in open beta: exposed nested instances for more customization, preferred values for more clarity when instance swapping, and simplified instances for more focus on relevant properties.

Mike Davidson, ex-VP of Design at InVision and Twitter: ​“Figma did a lot of things right over the ten (yes, ten!) years they’ve worked on the product, but one thing they did that no one else has been able to replicate is meet and in some cases exceed native app performance inside of a web browser.“ Also: ​“Within the next several years, it’s going to be possible to go from idea in the morning, to prototype in the afternoon, to working code in the evening… and the company who can do that most thoughtfully is going to be one of the most important companies in the world.”

Hunter Walk: ​“Figma had crossed the ​‘this matters to Adobe’s future’ rubicon. They hit $400m ARR and were continuing to double. Figma revenue, independent of margin, was increasingly displacing revenue that might have gone to Adobe, or more specifically, creating pricing pressure on Adobe.”

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.”

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.

The official press release from Adobe. ​“Adobe and Figma will benefit all stakeholders in the product design process, from designers to product managers to developers, by bringing powerful capabilities from Adobe’s imaging, photography, illustration, video, 3D and font technology into the Figma platform. […] The transaction is expected to close in 2023, subject to the receipt of required regulatory clearances and approvals and the satisfaction of other closing conditions, including the approval of Figma’s stockholders.” See also Adobe’s Investor presentation on acquisition.

The official announcement from Dylan Field.

The design team at Spotify discusses balancing conflicting goals of creating a playful space for experimentation and fostering interdisciplinary team collaboration in the Figma files. The key to achieving both is balancing the exploratory nature of design with a logical organization in your shared work. ​“A chaotic mess of brilliant designs is incomprehensible without a helpful file structure but too much structure early on might stifle your team’s inspiration.”

Steve Dennis reflects on his experiences of using Figma and tries to identify the biggest pain points. It’s a thoughtful list of possible improvements that I pretty much agree with. Design tokens and the official marketplace would be at the top of my list.