What's next for design tools
Issue 257: Figma's IPO marks a huge milestone. What now?
On July 31, 2025, Figma, the software design company, went public under $FIG. Once a potential acquisition by Adobe, the road to IPO was a long one for Figma and hopefully a signal for other tech companies exploring the public market. I've had the pleasure of knowing many of the Figma folks from the early days in the New Montgomery office to continued relationships with them today.
As we celebrate this moment with them, I reflect on the question of how design tools evolve moving forward. It's focused on what happens with Figma but the industry in general. In the AI era, many speculated the demise of design (I was not one of them). It turns out design is more important than ever.
Making and creating will continue to be human behavior as things become mass-produced. Design is getting commoditized, and it's good.
Let me explain. When a discipline or craft is described as being commoditized, the worst-case scenario comes up; job loss and no longer needing a certain service. This is understandable and often true. The assumption is that if design isn't commoditized, it results in a continued demand for design as a practice. That's not necessarily true. The result is that people become more tolerant of bad design. There are factors due to this: skills, budget, and the ability to envision what good looks like.
Figma's vision when launched was to make Design more accessible and a free alternative to Photoshop and other software. The result in the commoditization phase elevates design quality expectations as conveyed in this sketch:
As the production of design becomes cheaper and more effective, it becomes democratized for everyone. For goods and products, this is similar to giving people access to the Replicator in Star Trek: The Next Generation. People can now have websites for their business, wedding, or other needs without the cost of hiring a designer, whom they may not afford to spend money on. People will have different levels of taste and care in quality, and there is a threshold at which people will spend money on it. The Replicator elevates the floor, not the ceiling.
Chat LLMs are the equivalent of Replicators now for people to make images, stories, and writing assistance. The implications will force new originality to be created as a result of it. When everyone can build anything, brand and taste become the enduring differentiators in a world where the means of production are widely accessible.
“Brand and taste become the enduring differentiators in a world where the means of production are widely accessible.”
If this is the new world, which I hope it is, let's speculate what the new workflows and capabilities might feel like.
The result is four types of software: Commercial, Boutique, Personal, and Disposable. From this emphasis on key categories, I believe design tools require different workflows for the next phase of commoditized design that pushes new originality.
Workflows and capabilities
There are key changes in workflows: The ability to generate variations of designs, code infusion, and creating a brand and visual language.
Layout and variant generation
In 2010, two Twitter engineers created "Twitter Blueprint," an open-source front-end framework for web and mobile-responsive sites. Later renamed Bootstrap, it inconsequentially became a signal of templated experiences with no differentiation. As a result, websites such as Every Fucking Twitter Bootstrap Website Ever. Vibe-coded apps are going through a similar phase.
In the design process, it's an early requirement to explore different variations of a problem; not only one solution, but alternative paths to a solution. This may be a specific UI component or the flow of an entire feature. It's no surprise that there are dozens of new tools such as Variant AI, MagicPath, Subframe, and other software exploring this.
Code infusion
Code export is not a new feature. However, the infusion of code with design visual editors continues to be an area where there is no clear winner. It's 2025, and Storybook remains such a huge dependency on maintaining design and code. Vercel's v0 is adding a visual editor to bridge the two, and Figma launched code layers for Figma Sites.
Brand and visual language
Similar to the commodification of code, brand, and visual languages succumb to the issue of AI slop. It's always funny to me when someone tells me they used AI design, and the answer is, "I can tell..." as in it's obvious with the Shrimp Jesus-esque aesthetics. By using AI in creative, it is possible to attain a unique look. If you look at anything Phi Hoang from Perplexity creates, it's a clear sign that care and craft can exist with AI.
Iterating and daisy-chaining tools can get good results. That's why I'm excited about tools like Visual Electric and Flora that encourage creativity. Though I still have a lot of work to do to get it to a system and standard, I created Tapestry's visual assets with Visual Electric to create something I felt was a bit more unique and different.
Platform and ecosystem
Now that we have looked at a capabilities perspective, let's look at the platform and ecosystem in which tooling plays a role.
Open standards and protocols
As we enter a new era of design tooling, open standards and protocols will matter more than ever. Figma’s success was in part due to being browser-native and multiplayer from day one—but going forward, composability and interoperability will define what’s next.
We’re already seeing the emergence of frameworks like MCP for agent coordination and WCAG for accessibility as table stakes, not nice-to-haves. These protocols offer more than guidelines—they’re infrastructure. They create shared expectations across tools, platforms, and teams. The web itself didn’t flourish because it was proprietary; it scaled because of open standards like HTML and CSS.
If we want the design ecosystem to grow beyond a handful of walled gardens, we’ll need more than APIs and plugin marketplaces. We need protocols that enable design tools, AI models, and even entire workflows to communicate in a common language. That’s the only way creativity scales in the enterprise—when files, components, and intent are portable across ecosystems, not trapped in one.
Bring Your Own Tools (BYOT)
The days of mandating a single design tool across an organization are numbered. In the AI-native workplace, the expectation will be Bring Your Own Tools (BYOT). This doesn’t mean chaos—it means respecting how people work best and enabling them to plug into shared systems.
Some designers may thrive in Figma. Others might build custom workflows in Penpot, Utopia, or even script their interface layers using AI and CLI-based tools. Developers already live this way: one uses Vim, another VS Code, and they both ship from the same repo. Designers deserve the same flexibility.
Enterprise software can no longer afford to be allergic to choice. Instead, the challenge is to build infrastructure that supports diversity in tooling without breaking downstream collaboration. This is where open formats, atomic component systems, and AI-powered normalization layers come into play.
In the future, the best teams won’t enforce tools—they’ll design for interoperability. BYOT isn’t just a cultural shift. It’s a strategic advantage.
Recap
The future of design tooling won’t be decided by who controls the canvas—it’ll be won by whoever offers the most choice.
The next dominant design platform will seamlessly integrate code, media, and business logic, closing the gap between idea and implementation.
As a new MVC emerges, apps are decoupling—meaning design tools must play nicely in more fluid, modular ecosystems.
Open standards and protocols like MCP and WCAG will form the backbone of scalable, accessible design systems—not just features, but foundations.
Bring Your Own Tools will become the norm in enterprise environments, enabling teams to work in the tools they choose while contributing to a unified workflow.
Design tools aren’t just for designers anymore. The future belongs to platforms that embrace openness, interoperability, and creative flexibility—because that’s where great software gets made.
Hyperlinks + notes
A collection of references for this post, updates, and weekly reads.
As Figma goes public, a turning point in the long-awaited IPO market recovery takes shape
Judson Collier is starting something new. If you're an early startup needing brand help, I can't recommend him enough (he worked with us on the Replit rebrand)
Zero to One — Handbook for Entrepreneurial Engineers by Kun Chen
Building Agents with Intuition by Jackie Vullinghs
Job opportunities
Atlassian roles
Design Operations Lead (Australia)
Other roles
Front is hiring a Head of Design
Oura is hiring a Vice President of Software Design
MasterClass is hiring a VP of Product Design
Webflow is hiring a Staff Product Designer, New Products
Appreciated the thoughtfulness of this, David. Specifically, BYOT ... designers should have the same flexibility and choice in tools as eng. 🤟🤟