Design - "art as it applies to problem solving"
Figma dropped their S1 earlier this month. Cue "will the IPO window open?" from investors. This isn't an S1 review but a ❤️ letter. When people ask me what my favourite company is, I say Figma. There are lots of companies I like, a lot, but Figma, oh Figma.
My design background
To set the context, I was 13 when I found a copy of Photoshop 7. I installed, ran it and spent the next two hours staring at it in confusion whilst my RAM was pushed to the limit. I had no idea what I was looking at or what anything did. I spent the next six months learning how to use it. I started with vBulletin forum signatures and graduated to recreating video game covers and eventually found my niche in making websites and album covers for music artists. I fell in love with design. I came home after school, consumed tutorials, and made stuff - every day - always with hip hop playing in the background. This hobby led to a side hustle which paid me well until college. I worked my way from PS7 to CS2 and all the way to CS4. Then I stopped designing in college. I had turned my attention to spreadsheets. Gone were layers, brushes, plug-ins and vectors.
The design problem...well, my design problem
I took part in a lot of design competitions (called design battles on some forums - don't laugh!). I also joined a design crew. Well, an e-crew to be precise. We didn't actually know each other IRL. At times, I would design with other people. One guy really kicked ass in typography, another was a master at curves and colour balancing. All this collaboration (or as we called the pieces, collabos) meant pinging PSD files back and forth and quality control was a nightmare that involved manually copying over layers into the latest PSD file. Design was for the silos.
The web developer problem...someone else's problem
I also learned to code. Enough to be dangerous and Dreamweaver certainly helped (shoutout to Macromedia!). When builds became complicated, I would enlist the help of a hip hop head I met on a forum - Ryan. We only spoke on MSN or AIM messenger. He was a couple of years older and knew PHP, better than I did at least. I would design something, send it to him and he would use Microsoft Paint to mark up changes. "Move this here...move that there...kill the emboss on this image...the footer area is too big." We’d go back and forth in chat to clarify. Wasn’t it easier to just talk live? Nope. Two things - 1) he was based in the US, I think 2) my voice hadn't broken so using voice notes in MSN was frankly embarrassing. Long story short, designers did their work in Photoshop (and Illustrator) and developers either used an IDE, notepad or Dreamweaver (or a combination).
Figma launch
When Figma launched in 2016, I was an investment banking analyst. I wasn't designing webpages or cover art but confidential information memorandums. PowerPoint was my canvas, and I had memorised every Microsoft Office shortcut I needed to be...dangerous. The only time Photoshop crossed my mind was when I ran into the same collaboration problem in PowerPoint. In banking, we worked with files called riders. Someone worked in the master and others would work in riders, which were carved-out slides that could be later inserted in the master. Banking detour aside, Figma ran entirely in the browser, using WebGL, where people could collaborate...real time. Damn.
Design after Figma
On the back of collaboration and a web-based design OS (perhaps not an OS at the start), Figma kept building. Community and plug-ins, libraries, mobile design, developer hand-off, variants, FigJam, Dev Mode, Figma Slides, Draw and so on. In Figma's pursuit of product extension (and excellence), the user experience was focused on maniacally. Figma brought developers, marketers and writers into the design process. The Community was real. It was larger. It fed the product and its improvement. Fast forward today: 13m MAUs, 2/3 are non designers, 132% NDR. Ideate > Visualise > Build > Ship. Beautiful. In ~10 years, it became the industry standard. A place where design starts. I talk about great software changing behaviour. This is it.
When talking about AI, Figma has this saying of "lowering the floor and raising the ceiling." The idea that you make more people participate in the design process but also raise the ceiling of what you can do. If I'm honest, this notion applied to Figma even before the AI wave.
PS - When I say I like Figma, I speak as an investor who has a soft spot for design based on my experience. In my day-to-day, I haven't used it a lot and haven't had to. By the time Figma rolled out and rolled on, I wasn't designing much, if at all. I have dabbled here and there to help friends or founders out but this is firmly one of those companies I have watched over time and admired.
PSS - For what it's worth, cloud and collaboration was never in Adobe's DNA. Autodesk for years tried to move to the cloud and break down silos. Engineers complained that Revit hadn't been updated in years. Project Quantum failed. Then came Project Plasma and that failed. Forma launched in 2023 and Autodesk sort of delivered on their cloud experience 7/8 years later.