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Dann Petty has been one of the most vocal Figma critics lately. (See his previous post for some context, or go all the way back to moving drafts drama in the summer.) I don’t think corporations need help defending themselves, but in this case, I see the situation from a different angle and want to share some thoughts.

First, I built my first Framer website recently and thought it was a compelling alternative for designing websites. It often takes me longer to prototype a throw-away interaction in Figma than to do it straight in code (especially with AI!), so designing and animating the actual website instead of a mockup felt refreshing. I missed some of the more advanced features (no variables, really?), but I’m sure they are on the roadmap. In the end, it wasn’t the right tool for this project, but I agree with Dann that similar tools will be ​“owning the web design market”. That said, they have nothing to offer product designers.

Here is the part I disagree with: “(People are) mad at Figma because they lost focus on designers and got over bloated with useless features no one wanted or needed and started to focus on developers and their Config event.” Dann doesn’t specify which features he considers useless, but I assume it’s those related to larger design systems and developer handoff. Personally, I rarely feel restricted while working on visual design, but often hit the wall with a lack of CSS grids, inability to replicate the props.children behavior in components, still incomplete variables support, barebones design system analytics, Dev Mode, prototyping, etc. On my product team engineers outnumber designers 5 to 1, so a lot of our time and attention is spent on cross-team alignment. These features might be useless to freelancers and agencies, but worth their weight in gold to product teams.

Lastly, a note on Figma becoming ​“incredibly expensive.” First, they kept the same $15/​m price of the Professional plan since 2018. According to the CPI Inflation Calculator, $15 in 2018 had the same buying power as $19.31 today — pretty close to $20. Second, at least in the US, $20/​m or $192/​year is not much for a pro tool — some of my streaming and newspaper subscriptions cost more. Third, it now includes two more products! My team just upgraded our Figma account to the Organization plan and it was cheaper to wait for the new pricing as we no longer needed separate licenses for FigJam and Slides. This will not be true for everyone, but not all seats increased in price while getting some perks.

Luis is working on an incredible community resource. Can’t wait to dig into it!

Lee Black beautifully recreated a legendary record player by Hans Hugelot and Dieter Rams.

Nice built-in support for code blocks with syntax highlighting in Slides.

Plugins are now available in Figma Slides, and three dozen plugins have already been updated to support it.

Cool ​“Figma Studio Deck” illustration by Bedirhan Doğan.

Kinda wild how big of a deal last week’s Aspect Ratio release has become. While it’s one of the ​“finally!” releases, it’s also a good reminder that many features considered essential by product teams might actually wait quite a while. The Technology Brothers podcast covered the design community’s reaction and followed up with a discussion about Figma’s position in the market.

SVG exports will now correctly render background blur and both angular and diamond gradients.

Miggi shows a wildly creative application of boolean groups to vector networks.

James breaks down the design process behind creating a very cool hover interaction.

Continuing with surprising discoveries, Ridd noticed that interactive Figma prototypes could be embedded on Twitter/​X. In his own words: ​“If I’m looking for work on here… I’m going to have a pre-assembled reply tweet in Typefully that is a Figma embed of my best designs.”

Roman noticed that Figma natively converts OKLCH to HEX in the color field. I held my breath for a moment, but the conversion is inaccurate in files using the P3 color profile. For those curious about why this is a tricky problem to solve, I wrote an in-depth thread a while ago.

This obviously oversimplified attention-grabber made the rounds on design Twitter last week. Tools, processes, and skills are rapidly changing, but they complement each other. Instead of being line cooks focused on a single station, designers can now prepare an entire meal. However, if the ingredients are undercooked and the sauce is sloppy, that meal won’t be worth much.

Ideation, visual exploration, prototyping, and even building deserve the best tools for the job. Check out insightful takes on this from Noah Levin, Jordan Singer, Ridd, and Jess.

A new sidebar provides a large collection of diagramming shapes for engineers, along with quick access to recently used ones. Stroke color is now independent of fill color for shapes and sections, and connector labels are movable. Additionally, there is an updated color palette with more variety and consistency.

Nice to see stunning gradients made from scratch. The Figma file is now available for download.

You can always rely on Vijay to come up with the most creative ways to achieve special effects.

Blows my mind that this is made in Figma. See other cool experiments in Lee Black’s X profile.

Luis considers using opacity to decrease the volume of variables in the design system.

Fons Mans now uses Figma mostly to translate ideas onto the screen quickly, then switches to a tool that lets him build or create the final product or visual. Cameron Moll also follows this approach.

It works really well when the designer is involved in the implementation. Figma is a fantastic tool for quickly exploring different directions, but after reaching an alignment, it’s time to polish the final version of the product, not its image. I was frustrated by wasting time whenever I spent hours prototyping an elaborate but disposable interaction in Figma. Modern AI tools make this final iteration even more accessible to less technical folks. That said, in most organizations, designers still can’t touch code — either that will change, or the final polish will still be happening in Figma for quite some time.

Hot take: ​“Figma’s reliance on craftsmanship design culture feels vulnerable in a world moving toward automation & commodification.” I’m very curious to see what the big theme of Config 2025 will be.