Tweets

Mal highlights a few core features of Buzz — bulk create, make or edit images with AI, and wonderful templates to get started.

Luis shares a bunch of examples made with Figma Make.

I don’t see myself using Draw much, but I’m so happy it’s here for talented artists like Mehak Samaiya.

A rare feature that’s both underrated and long-awaited.

Joel Miller, Design Manager for the Figma Draw team, shares his five favorite design details of the new mode.

Luis shows how to design a data table with grids. This is one of the grid applications I’m most excited about. Notice how he adds notes with the new annotations tool as well — I’ve been using it more and more for notes lately, while keeping comments limited to discussions.

“Figma teases a future seat option for teammates who want to brainstorm, present, produce and manage content. Content seat will include: Figma Buzz, Figma Sites CMS (coming soon), Figma Slides, and FigJam.” Price is unknown, but my bet is on something close to Dev Mode.

Ridd is spot on: ​“2024: Figma uses AI to help designers design 😡 👎 2025: Figma uses AI to help designers code 🎉 🙌”

Noah Levin, VP of Design at Figma, gives a shout-out to designers behind the new product releases. First, I love seeing the individuals getting recognized for their hard work. Second, this is a great list of people to follow right away.

Molly shares a tip from Brad Frost’s new course on reusing ​“core tokens” across multiple brands.

Meng To shows how to generate designs in Aura and bring them to Figma. He includes a Figma file with 57 examples and they look pretty good!

A new Config talk just got announced: production designer Jeremy Hindle will talk about the creative vision behind Severance.

The new curved connectors mode for right-brained people. I’ll stick to my neatly organized ​“elbowed” connectors.

Wow, this looks incredible for mini-interactions. Looking forward to trying Magic Animator by Lottielab soon.

Anastasia shared a timelapse of drawing beautiful realistic keyboard buttons in Figma.

Brett from Designjoy shows how to apply dithering in Figma using the Dither plugin.

Karri Saarinen: ​“The idea that AI might ruin visual quality feels like a non-issue since there wasn’t much quality to ruin in the first place. […] My general view of AI is that it will just let us do more things, not take away things.”

Annotations are now available in Design Mode with new color-coded categories. Love that categories are fully editable, so you can adjust them to your team’s workflow.

The public rollout comes with a great commercial. Epic to see Soren Iverson in the main role!

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.