Since its inception about five years ago, Figma’s Config conference has quickly become one of the more important annual checkpoints for the design community.
This is not only because the tool has rapidly become the de facto choice for designers, but because it’s largely made by designers, for designers. Their embrace of AI also serves as a barometer for how the technology will shape designers’ work – and perhaps even the future of the job itself.
Let’s look at a few of the key announcements:
AI-powered prototyping via Figma Make — Powered by Anthropic’s Claude model, this feature allows you to describe what output you want using natural language. Essentially, it’s prompt-to-code that lets you generate designs and the corresponding code snippets. It’s pitched as a tool for broader design exploration rather than polished, final-final solutions. If the promise holds true, this could be pretty magical. (More on some of the broader implications below 👇 ).
Side note: There are also some nice quality-of-life enhancements courtesy of AI, such as automatic layer renaming and the ability to rewrite text content, which is significantly more useful as early-stage-copy than the classic Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet… placeholder!
Figma Buzz appears to introduce bulk asset creation, storage, and simplified distribution capabilities. Pretty neato.
Figma Grids enhances grid layout controls to better mirror CSS Grid functionality. While Auto Layout is sometimes clunky, this update seems to offer a smoother workflow.
Figma Sites will apparently make it easy to build and publish directly from your design files. For designers working on web, constantly tweaking responsiveness, breakpoints, and similar elements is tedious. The blocks and layout tools feel reminiscent of Squarespace. A CMS is also apparently on the way. If I understand that correctly, it should be a good thing – though potentially tricky in practice given how many CMSs most companies generally have in place.
And finally, Figma Draw brings improved vector editing tools for freehand drawing and visual design – potentially pulling more users away from Adobe Illustrator and/or keeping them within the Figma ecosystem.
Most of these features help designers take the ball further downfield toward the production goal line. They also address key workflow pain points by automating pretty mundane tasks.
The Pros and Con(fig)s of AI
As mentioned earlier, the new AI prompt-to-design and code features significantly lower the barrier to start “designing.”
Some of my friends in product management think AI will ultimately replace designers. Designers, in turn, think AI will replace engineers. And engineers, well, they think AI will replace them both 😜.
While AI shows promise for early-stage concepting, ideation, and exploration, we’re still a pretty long way from replacing any of those roles.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m a huge fan and use it wherever possible to complement and augment existing work systems. I want it to excel and using it can be a great starting point for creating a new wireframe, mockup, or even an entire end-to-end flow.
However, designing without a deep understanding of business goals, the customer, or existing tech infrastructure will produce something generic at best; completely sub-optimal at worst. That’s also assuming you are starting from scratch – whereas integrating AI-generated designs into an existing product is significantly more complex.
Context, nuance, and straight-up sensemaking is still something these generative models lack; at least for the time being. They will, of course, improve. Perhaps more narrowly trained models will emerge – ones that are fine-tuned over time with a sophisticated understanding of the company’s business model, customer needs, and its tech stack. Continual integration of things like analytics, design systems, and competitive insights would also be amazing. But, we’re not there yet.
So in the mean time, I’m looking forward to these Figma features going live and playing with them. I’ll also continue to explore how Vibe Designing is evolving within other products – especially those beyond the traditional designer toolkit.
It’s a brave new world. Stay tuned.
Marc