As recently as 2021, Figma was a one-product company. That product was Figma Design, the dominant tool for creating app and web interfaces. The company’s subsequent addition of offerings such as FigJam (whiteboarding) and Figma Slides (presentations) was hardly a frenzied land grab.
But the announcements Figma made this week at its Config conference in San Francisco cover so much ground that my impulse was to interpret them as a massive, sprawling new attempt to take on . . . well, almost everybody.
Figma Make turns prompts into AI-generated code? Shades of GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and numerous other AI programming tools. Figma Sites provides features for constructing, hosting, and updating websites? Well, that’s a content management system, like WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix. Figma Buzz helps companies create marketing assets that retain a degree of consistency, with AI help if desired? Sounds akin to Canva and Adobe’s Canva rival, Express. Figma Draw lets people create free-form vector illustrations? So does Adobe’s 38-year-old Illustrator.
Figma’s Config conference at San Francisco’s Moscone Center [Photo: Courtesy of Figma]
When I asked Figma cofounder and CEO Dylan Field whether the company was indeed trying to compete directly with so many well-established players in multiple categories, he discounted the notion. Instead, he told me, the new products all support its original focus on turning raw concepts into shippable software. “The Figma journey that we’re trying to support users on is going from idea to product,” he told me. “Everything’s truly through that lens.”
Still, it would be a mistake to regard Figma’s news as NBD. Even if its original product was a design tool, two-thirds of its users aren’t designers. They’re all the other people inside companies who play roles in product creation, and even if all the company does is address their needs, it will brush up against new rivals. As Field likes to declare, “Creativity is the new productivity.” Figma might be in as good a position as anyone to spread that vision to additional classes of software.
As a business, Figma also has every incentive to think big. It’s been almost a year and half since its $20 billion deal to be acquired by Adobe fell apart over antitrust concerns, leaving it as an independent entity pursuing a self-contained vision. Last month, it confidentially filed a draft S-1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission, beginning the process that will eventually lead to it going public. The more optimistic investors are about the company’s ability to keep growing, the better its IPO will fare.
Figma Buzz [Image: Figma]
(Figma Design’s ubiquity as a UX design tool is manifestly obvious—90% of designers who responded to a 2023 survey said they used it—but as a private company, Figma is secretive about hard numbers relating to its business. It does say that 85% of users are outside the U.S., proving that it’s a global phenomenon. But the last time it talked about financial return was in September 2022, as part of the Adobe deal announcement. Back then, it said that it expected to do $400 million in revenue that year, with a gross profit of 90%. More current information will come out as part of the IPO process.)
As Figma has decided which new products it might build, it hasn’t had to look far. Like Excel and Photoshop, Figma Design is the kind of tool that people grow comfortable with and call into service for jobs well beyond its theoretical mandate. Rather than turn it into too much of a kitchen sink, the company has tended to spin out tasks into new purpose-built apps. All of them have a familial resemblance and work together as a suite.
The centrality of Figma Design does serve to set the company’s latest products apart from others in the same general zip code. Maybe Figma Buzz will win some hearts based purely on its quality. But it seems even more likely that people will pick it over Canva or Adobe Express because it’s optimized to serve workflows that are already Figma-centric. “It’s very easy to be able to push a template from Figma Design to the Buzz surface,” Field says. “And then people know exactly what they can edit. They can go edit it, insert images, or go find a different template if they so choose, and know that they’re on brand. Or they can go off the rails if they want to.”
Then there’s AI, which was already in the air at Config 2023. At last year’s conference, the company announced a design-generating feature called Make Designs, which—like AI rollouts all over the tech industry—got off to a bumpy start. After controversy ignited on Twitter over the eerie similarities between a weather app it designed and the one Apple ships on the iPhone, Figma pulled back the feature and reworked it.
Even now, designers are still puzzling out how they feel about AI. In a new study commissioned by Figma, only 31% said they currently use the technology for their core work, 69% were satisfied with it, and 54% thought it improved quality. All those figures were notably lower than ones reported in the same study by developers.
Uncertainty over AI might be a sign the killer apps haven’t arrived. “People value efficiency,” Field says. “And so where we can help there, that’s really important. But also, they really value raising the ceiling and making it so they’re able to do better work. And I think that’s where AI has not yet had the impact it should.”
Customer feedback might help explain Figma’s careful positioning of its new AI features. The company says some organizations may ship products created by Make, which lets users start with something they’ve roughed out in Figma Design and then use prompts to generate code. Mostly, though, it’s emphasizing the potential to quickly turn flat designs into rich prototypes that help push progress along. Another application: adding a dash of custom interactivity to websites powered by Figma Sites.
Figma Make [Image: Figma]
AI is also present in both Figma Design and Figma Buzz in the form of image generation features based on OpenAI’s latest GPT-Image-1 model. But when I spoke with Field, he seemed less excited by the prospect of turning over image creation to a machine than by Figma Draw, a classical sort of illustration tool for people who want to hand-create imagery that’s precise, reflects a distinctive style, and may even mimic work done with old-school art implements such as a paintbrush. If Draw has any AI at all, it didn’t matter enough to merit a mention in the blog post introducing the product.
“We have a lot of opportunity to build tools for folks [to] be more divergent and have more craft and stand out,” Field told me. “And we think that’s the differentiator that’ll make people win over time.” As some organizations lean too heavily on AI, we’re going to see more and more bland, look-alike products. It’s nice to think that doubling down on unmistakably human creativity could be a competitive advantage. And that Figma won’t stray too far from its traditional emphasis on helping create such work, even as it figures out how to make AI make sense.
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