Thoughts on Figma's announcements
245: What does post-Config look like?
I’m recovering from an incredible week at Config. What began as a small conference at The Midway in San Francisco has grown into the one week each year when designers from around the world gather for Figma’s Config. This year, in addition to hosting our own Atlassian event and participating in other community gatherings, the main stage was set at Moscone Center for the keynote—and it didn’t disappoint.
At Config 2025, Figma announced powerful new tools aimed at bridging designers and developers even further: a native prototyping-to-code handoff pipeline, AI-assisted asset generation, and deeper support for design system governance. These features signal Figma’s continued evolution from “just a design tool” into a full-fledged product platform—one that speaks to every stage of the creative and development process.
There are plenty of questions surrounding this strategy. Has Figma become the new Adobe? Do they still care about software designers? What about design systems? I’m not here to play Nostradamus, but I do have a few thoughts on the direction they’re heading, why I think they’re making some smart bets, and why their future still looks bright. These views are my own—not those of my employer or vendor partners—but shared as a fellow craftsperson who cares deeply about this space.
The Landscape and ecosystem
Before critiquing the product announcements, let’s talk about the evolving ecosystem. For the first time in modern tech history, there’s genuine momentum for design-first founders. Design as a craft, as tooling, and as infrastructure, is finally being taken seriously by investors. The pendulum, long swung toward dev tools, is beginning to balance. Founders with taste, product intuition, and a strong design sensibility are no longer the exception. They’re the advantage.
And for the first time, designers have real choice in tooling. Where developers have long enjoyed a range of IDEs, frameworks, and build pipelines, designers traditionally had to settle for one dominant tool at a time: Photoshop, then Sketch, then Figma. Now? We're seeing the early signs of a true tooling renaissance. Products like Paper, Variant, Flora, and Stitch are carving out differentiated value—and pushing Figma to keep innovating.
Strategically, Figma seems intent on meeting all designers where they are—not just UI designers. That may feel disappointing to those of us focused on software and interface design, but it’s a welcome expansion for brand designers, illustrators, motion designers, and other design disciplines. Figma’s reach is growing, and that may be a good thing for the design profession overall.
What’s promising
Though every designer comes to Figma with different needs, I’m optimistic about where the platform is going. Based on this year’s announcements, here are three opportunities I’m especially excited about:
1. The design app platform
I heard someone say, "Figma is the new Adobe," as if that were a bad thing. In some ways, it might be—but not in the way they meant. Figma is increasingly becoming the connective tissue across teams and disciplines. It’s not just a canvas anymore—it’s the glue that binds design, engineering, and product thinking together.
Yes, prices will likely go up. But the cost of not having an integrated platform—of relying on fragmented tooling and slow handoffs—is often much greater. With the rise of Agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and new post-database software architectures, tools that consolidate context and accelerate workflows will win.
2. Drawing: the original natural language
Drawing was humanity’s first interface with abstraction—before words, before math. It’s how we told stories, taught survival, and imagined futures. I was glad to see Figma Draw become a more prominent part of the product family. Right now, the feature set is comparable to traditional tools like Illustrator or Procreate, but the future potential is exciting. With advances in computer vision and image recognition, hand-drawn input could be instantly transformed into components, layouts, or even code.
Drawing isn’t just a creative tool. It’s a thinking tool. In an AI-driven world, visual literacy may become as important as written literacy.
3. Making design faster for everyone
The first thing mentioned in the keynote? Performance. That wasn’t just a technical update—it was a signal. Figma is listening to its community and investing in the designer experience. Better speed and responsiveness benefit everyone, especially as the platform expands to support more file types, larger design systems, and cross-functional collaboration.
It’s also worth noting that roughly 65% of Figma users are now non-designers—a stat that reflects Figma’s shift from a niche design tool to a horizontal collaboration platform. Improving performance helps everyone, not just designers.
Recap
Any tooling software is going to be personal for the people using it. I understand why some people may not be excited about the expansive nature of shipping new products. For me, it’s a smart play. In order for AI adoption to be successful, it has to go through the entire tech stack and user experience. Figma has inputs and outputs which makes it ripe to be the control layers for a lot of AI interactions.
My hope is that Figma becomes the design platform; a suite of apps that are interoperable with other apps and models in the ecosystem.
Hyperlinks + notes
A collection of references for this post, updates, and weekly reads.
Config 2025: Pushing design further → Keynote from Config
Config 2025: Figma product launch keynote (Dylan Field, CEO & Co-founder, Figma)
Career opportunities
Huge thank you to those who came to the Design at Atlassian event. We are hiring designers
Thanks for the Stitch shoutout, David! It was nice meeting you last week.
65% of users being non-designers is telling for sure. I’ve felt that shit at Microsoft as well. PMs are getting more and more comfortable whipping up a Fig Jam file, leaving comments, etc. I think it’s a good thing.