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Design Better
Noah Levin: AMA with Figma's VP of Design on their latest releases
01:03:43
Noah Levin on scaling design teams in the AI era, improving designer–developer collaboration, and what’s next for Figma’s workflow tools.
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Transcript92 lines
- [00:01]
Aaron Walter
Figma is central to most designers workflows these days, and so new releases to the platform are cause for excitement. Some big things were dropped recently at figma's annual conference Config. Noah Levin, VP of Design at figma, joined us for a special AMA with the Design Better community to demo some of those new features and answer your questions.
- [00:25]
Eli Woolery
During the ama, we had some great questions from our audience covering topics like scaling, scaling design teams in the AI era, improving designer developer collaboration, and what's next for figma's tools.
- [00:36]
Aaron Walter
By the way, did you know that we do AMAs every month? It's actually a benefit that all of our premium members enjoy and it gets you access to some of the most influential designers and creative thinkers in the world. To learn more, head to designbetterpodcast.com subscribe. And now here's our conversation with Noah Levin, VP of Design at Figma. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Design Better AMA this month with Noah Levin. Hey, Noah, how are you?
- [01:08]
Noah Levin
Hey, good morning. How are you? Good to be here.
- [01:11]
Aaron Walter
Noah, you're at the Figma headquarters today, right?
- [01:14]
Noah Levin
I am. You can see a little bit of it around me here. I'm on the 10th floor here in our San Francisco office. Nice.
- [01:21]
Aaron Walter
Nice. Fantastic. Well, we're excited to talk to you today. We're going to cover a lot of territory. Figma has just released a ton of new features at Config. I would assume that a lot of folks here have maybe gotten wind of some of those features and we'll talk a little bit about that. But first, before we jump in, Eli, let's talk about what's new with Design Better.
- [01:45]
Eli Woolery
Let's do it. One second. All right, so here, here at the top, we got a kind of a fun thing that's a bit different. We were at the New York Times last month and we got interviewed by the head of their design team. So the kind of tables returned. We're used to asking questions, but we got to tell a bit of our story. You know, how Design Better came about and how we, you know, now think about it and run the business. And so if you want to look at a little bit of behind the scenes there, that's a fun one to check out. Just came out yesterday or. Sorry, no, this week, Tuesday, we've also been doing some more video rewinds. So we. Up till now we've mostly released audio from our episodes, but we're starting to go back and edit some of the video and release that. So this is a really great episode with Kamasu Washington, who's a legendary jazz musician. He worked with Snoop Dogg and other great musicians.
- [02:49]
Noah Levin
Yeah.
- [02:50]
Aaron Walter
If you have, if you're not familiar with Kamasi Washington, totally cool. But I mean, this guy is a giant. He's incredible. And there's a lot that we as designers can learn from people in different disciplines. Super creative person. Also probably some neurodiversity that's happening, which is a red thread we see with a lot of creative people we talk to. And this, this video interview with him was fantastic. He talks about working with Kendrick Lamar, what that's like working with Lauryn Hill, Snoop Dogg. It's, it's definitely worth checking out.
- [03:25]
Eli Woolery
Yeah, it's a great one. We've, we had on Josh Clark and Veronica Kindred. They work on broadly on design systems. But we, we talked a lot about how generative AI is influencing the evolution of interfaces. And kind of a unique thing about that interview is they're actually father daughter working together. So that was kind of a nice dynamic to that one. Speaking of design systems, we had an AMA with Brad Frost earlier in June, and he's part of our Experts Resonance program. Ryan Rumsey is as well, and he wrote an article here about the hard truths that design designers need to hear. And then we're continuing to expand our, our library of books. So if you're a premium design member, Design Better member, you get access to our library of books. So we've got all these ones out, and then we've got a couple more in the wings. Right, Aaron, which ones we got coming up?
- [04:20]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, Collaboration Handbook, the Animation handbook, and we have a few more. So you get access to all of these books when you become a premium subscriber, along with lots of other things as well.
- [04:32]
Eli Woolery
Yeah. So lots of new stuff and come check it all out.
- [04:38]
Aaron Walter
All right, well, let's just jump in. I want to say hi to everybody. We've got folks in Atlanta, New Jersey, Ria, South Florida, India, Portland, the Philippines, Nepal, folks from around the world, Mexico, which is where I am today. Eli is in, in Carmel on the coast of California. No, let's jump in. What's new with you and what have you been up to at figma?
- [05:04]
Noah Levin
Yeah, yeah, it's been a ride. I mean, I'm so excited to be here and chat about it. I've been here going on almost eight years, so it's been quite a journey. And I've got some stuff to share, so maybe I can share my screen and kind of show you a couple things.
- [05:20]
Aaron Walter
Let's jump in.
- [05:22]
Noah Levin
Awesome. One Sec. Here we go. Let's see if this works. All right, we got it. Yep, you got it. Cool. Well, I just, you know, I'm a visual person, so I figured I'd put together a couple things to show you all today. I just think it helps when telling a story to just see things, you know, and so much of what we do at Figma is obviously very visual in nature, as are the things that you create with it. So I thought it'd be fun to just kind of show you a few things just to kind of take you back. This is, this is 2017, around, I think, November, December. We're wearing 2018 T shirts because we were celebrating the new year ahead. We were about to. And, and this is the whole company fitting around a lunch table. We can't do that anymore. We've grown quite a bit since then, but it was, you know, a special time. You know, we were working on, I think at that moment, just the beginnings of like, plugins, prototyping, you know, early stage stuff. But it was really a special time and, and I was brought on, you know, around then, moved back to San Francisco. I was in New York at the time to help grow the design team. And so this is a snapshot in time each year of our design. Org. On the top left, you'll see that's around when I started. So this is Peter and Chris and Rasmus. And we were all. That's. That was the whole design team at the time. And, and, and, you know, over the years we, we grew quite a bit. So you can kind of see that evolution over time. I'll let you guess, when the pandemic set in, you might be able to notice the nature of the picture shifted a bit here in 2020 and 2021. But I'm so proud of this. You know, so much of what I do in my career, it's really about people. Everything we do is about our teams, about what we're able to do together. And, you know, and it's just so. It just brings me so much joy to like, see this and see the evolution of our team grow and how we've done the best we can to, to ship product here at figma. And so, yeah, a lot, lot over the years. We'll get into, like, some of the product evolution in a second here, but, but, you know, just kind of fun to remember that we're all people behind the screens that we sit in every day. I'm working hard on this stuff.
- [07:30]
Aaron Walter
Hey, Noah, can I ask you a quick question about this yeah, of course. Just looking at this visual representation, what I see is someone who's, who's been through, you know, team growth like this before as well. I know it's a lot, like, it's a lot for an individual to go through these changes. What's that been like for you to see. See the company grow and bring more people in, Having to manage a lot more people.
- [07:54]
Noah Levin
Yeah, great question. Yeah, we, you know, every. Every three to six months, it's felt like a different chapter or a different challenge or a different journey. And I, I honestly, like, I never thought in my career that I would be like, leading large organizations at all. Like, I. I'm a designer through and through. I like to make things, I like to build things. And so I don't know that I could have ever been prepared for the challenges that show up as, As a team grows. And, and so, you know, it's been. It's been humbling for sure, to say the least. You know, I'm sure I've made a lot of mistakes at every phase and at every turn, but, you know, but it's. It's been, it's been really interesting because you're dealing with not only the organization scaling and growing, but you're dealing with sort of the industry changing, this pandemic, the ways that we work changing. So you're kind of adapting constantly. So at some point you just realize, well, nothing is constant, you know, nothing in our lives generally is that constant. So you kind of just like, at some point get a little bit more comfortable with the idea that change is inevitable and that helps a little bit. But it's still, you know, again, each. Each phase, there's, There's a new lesson in it. So it's, it's been for sure a really interesting set of challenges. So, you know, and we can get into more of that as we go. There's. There's truly like, probably stories in each of those years. But. But I think one of the things I wanted to highlight is we've said this phrase and nothing great is made alone. And it's one of my favorite phrases and even evident in the slide before it by seeing all the people involved in making figma. And I think it's true of both how companies work to build products, but I also think it's true of how you work with your community when building products and how so much of what we do requires the feedback from everyone in the people using figma to help understand what we. What we should make next. And so I've always Felt like different companies have different, you know, philosophies, DNAs, things that drive them, things that motivate them. You know, usually it starts from the founder, something like that. And you know, I think of Apple is like very known to be kind of marketing design kind of driven company, right. I think of, of Google, I worked there for a couple of years, couple years and think of it as very kind of engineering centered and driven in what they do. And there's no right or wrong way in my opinion to do this. You know, you can, there's so many ways to build successful companies and teams and whatever. But with Figma, you know, you might think, okay, well it's a design tool so maybe the answer is that it's a design driven company. I actually would say that we are a very much a community centered company. I remember before I joined Figma, I met Dylan by being he's the CEO of Figma. As an early user of the product in 2015 I was just kind of, he was looking for feedback and, and in the earliest days I was so impressed with how leaned in they were to what I had to say about the product. And I was leading a team in New York, a company called ClassPass and we started to be an early adopter of Figma and they flew out an engineer named Ryan and this is probably 2016 to watch us work. And I was blown away. I was like, whoa, first of all, like you sent an engineer over, you sent, you know, like what? Like we're just a small team in New York, like what, why, what's going on here? And it was really because they genuinely just wanted to understand how people were using the tool. And that to me signaled that community was going to be an important part of this company. And it has been, you know, every day since. And I think it's one of the many reasons I'm excited to be here on this, this AMA together is to actually hear from you all and get some of the questions. Because behind those questions I'm sure are clues, clues for me on what we should be building next. And it's really, you know, you'll notice that a lot of us spend a lot of time on social media, our forums, going to the offices of different companies because we learn so much more that way of what's going on. Of course, as designers using Figma internally we have our own intuition, our own feedback about things, but, but we learn a lot by watching how people work. So if you go back to the beginning of Figma, right, we were one of the first, design tools in the browser. Really a great place to start collaborating with other people. At that time, a lot of people weren't sure that this is something they want. You know, it was, it was kind of a, a big shift in how people work to, to kind of work in the open and work transparently with each other. But, but I think it really, it really resonated at some point. You know, a lot of people realize that again, nothing great is made alone. So you really get the benefits of collaboration in this, in this space. But over the last 10 years the company has evolved a lot, right? We've, we've, we're now a multi product company, We're a platform more than a single tool. And so I'll talk about how each of these products is sort of, you know, going to our second product, FigJam in 2021, born out of the pandemic when everyone needed a whiteboard that they could work together on collaboratively without being in an office, you know, and that also came from observing that people were using figma, creating sticky note components and they were having meetings in Figma and we were blown away, like that's not what the tool was built for, right? It was built for screen design for software. And all of a sudden people were having discussions, robust, interesting conversations. And so that was a great clue that we should probably build a product around it. And you know, we've debated and can get into like whether or not you could just have Figma do everything or whether you need separate products. But it really helped because, you know, you don't want to bloat a product with too much at once. So it really helps to start to break things out eventually, of course, dev mode was born. Really helpful way to work with developers. We noticed that almost a third of our entire user base are developers, so, so only about a third are designers and then the last third is kind of a long tail of different roles. So wow, like a lot of people who aren't designers showing up in actually needing to build the things we're making. So of course we should build a product for them too. Then of course after that Figma slides similar thing with figjam, right? People were showing us that they wanted a slides tool because they were making slides in figma, which again, the tool wasn't built for that, but they did anyway. So it's one of the, one of the great privileges of working on a tool is you don't know what people are going to make yet. You know, like you put it out there, people might Use it for anything. And that is really an inspiring way for us to learn what's needed next. So then, of course, this past year, if any of you tuned in to config, I don't know if any of you were able to go, we shipped four new products, kind of doubling our product offering, which, which is a lot to digest, I'm sure. And I don't know if all of you have had a chance to try them all or not, but I wanted to take a beat and show you, like, why, why this is happening, you know, like why we're, why we're adding products to the ecosystem. And it's because we, we believe that we should offer the ability for you to whatever ideas in your head, whatever you're trying to build, we want to help you make it real, right? We want to help you put it into the world. Whatever your imagination is, we want to make it reality. And doing that requires a lot of different things, a lot of different steps, a lot of different kinds of challenges, right? And so at each of those phases, whatever, whatever the part of your journey, we hope to offer you a creative visual canvas to help you get your work done. And so that's why we've built this platform to do that. And, you know, so again, whether you're at the beginning and you're just brainstorming or then you're aligning together, you're working through slides to kind of get a vision together, maybe some storytelling, moving into high fidelity with Figma design, moving into more expression with Figma Draw, building it dev mode, maybe publishing it as a site, and then getting your message out into the world with different marketing assets and buzz. And then Figma make is something we see as kind of useful in any stage. And we'll talk about that in a second. I personally like to think of this as kind of like a creative operating system. You know, you're like, you're living in a world where you, you might need any one of these tools for a particular job to be done. And we hope that this is something that we can offer. We hope that people can find value in different phases, no matter what they're making. And so just going to take a second to show you kind of quick visual recap of each of the things that came out, because it can be a lot to remember. This is my personal favorite, Figma Make. It's a big one. So this is basically kind of a tool that lets you prompt something into existence. You can reference designs in doing that most recently about, I think, a week or Two ago, one of the top requests we've been hearing is, hey, I want to use my design system for make. Like, I want to be able to use all this work I put in over the last 10 years into my company design system. That needs to, needs to exist somehow here. Right? So this is step one of many in this journey. Was. All right, well, we need to, we know how important this is to you, so let's start by at least giving you something we're calling kind of style context. So in this quick video, you can see you publish, you know, one of your libraries for use in Figma make, and it makes sure that the styling and sort of, you know, rendering of your ideas at least matches the basic styles. Now, of course, this doesn't yet do things like components. We, we absolutely know that that's important and it's something we're thinking a lot about. Figma Draw, something that's really near and dear to my heart, really special product, lets you kind of express your ideas in much more, you know, rich and interesting and dynamic ways. Right. Allowing you to have this takes me back. For anyone who grew up using, you know, Photoshop and playing with DeviantArt and remember going back to the tutorials of how to make a brush, all that stuff, it's a lot of fun. It really helps you express more. But behind just brushes, there's actually like 20 plus things that came out as a part of Draw. And a lot of those things are useful whether you're drawing or making interfaces in general. And so this is kind of a quick, you know, recap of some of those things. Most recently, I think a week or two ago, we launched variable width stroke. So you can actually change the, you know, the widths of the stroke throughout a particular, you know, vector shape. And so there's a lot that went into this then of course, Figma sites. So the ability to just publish, you know, we knew you were already making, I forget what percentage, but a large portion of people using Figma were making websites. So it just makes sense that you should get a publish button, right? You should have the ability to make it real. And in a minute I'll show you some of the ones I personally made, which has been a lot of fun. But yeah, the whole goal here is just to make it much easier for you to have complete creative control over your work and get it into the world in a way that you're proud of. A big part of that most recently is something called Code Layers. I'm not sure if this video is going to Play, let's give it a shot. If not, that's okay. But basically it's the ability to add a prompt to existing designs. In this case, I took a Polaroid and let you basically shake it to show you the actual image. Didn't need to code, right? Not everyone can code, and that's okay. But you can prompt things using the power from Figma make directly into your sites and something we call code layers. I can show you a real example of that in a minute. And then finally, the fourth one, Figma Butts. And this is really about working with marketers to get your, your story into the world. And that comes in so many shapes and sizes, right? You might have Instagram, TikTok, you know, x Facebook, whatever, or real world, you know, kind of posters, all these moments. And you often need to scale that to different languages or different messages or different seasons. And this tool is really built to be much more accessible and easy to use for people who may not have a design background. But you as designers can make these bespoke templates using the tools you're familiar with so that other people can come in and just make quick changes and simple edits in the guardrails of the system that you want. Another kind of fun part about this, and this has been true of a lot of our products, now is building and bringing in the latest and greatest AI models into your work. And so partnering with companies like OpenAI here with GPT Image 1 that lets you just quickly make a prompt and say, hey, this image actually should be sunset for whatever reason, right? Like, you shouldn't have to leave Figma to do a lot of these things. You should be able to just whether it's remove the background, boost the resolution. We're thinking of so many more use cases around imagery that benefit from these new AI powerful tools. So lots of really fun stuff happening there. So I know that was a lot. Uh, I figured maybe instead of showing you slides, I would just show you some, some actual, you know, content and files from my own personal life, if that's interesting.
- [19:54]
Aaron Walter
Yes, please. That sounds great.
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Noah Levin
Awesome. So these are two sites I built. Um, I've actually never shared this with anyone before, so exclusive here. Uh, and, and it's this first one is something I called somethings, FYI as the URL. And so it's live. You can go to the site today after you're at home. And this is all built in Figma sites. And so the idea behind this is like, I don't know about you all, like, I love collecting Things like, I love, like, I like my favorite things. Like, there's something about it as an expression of what you care about, your identity, things that you think are beautiful and interesting. As designers, like, I feel like we both, we've a lot of appreciation for the fact that everything around us was designed like, it took work, it took effort. So I wanted to put together like an homage to some of my favorite objects. And that could be anything from like furniture to actual, like, software, TV shows, podcasts, here's, you know, design better today. And, and I just wanted a place to be able to share that, you know, and, and if other people were interested in that and, you know, maybe they can make their own or they can, you know, kind of publish their own. So what's fun is all of this just uses Figma, right? It's just all the same tools you're familiar with. So those are just components, right? And I can just change the image and text of a given component. It's using auto layout and grid. So I can just arrange them by using my left and right arrow keys, up and down. I even. And you can preview it here. And of course it's responsive, so, you know, making sure that it, it scales to different screen sizes. And then I built an Easter eggs. And so one popular Trend was these 3D kind of objects. I don't know if you've seen that trend in the last couple months. And I thought it was cute and why not use modern again, AI image tools to kind of try it out. So in this case, you know, you can kind of toggle between just screenshots from the Internet about these products that I like and viewing them in their kind of, you know, fun, cute, isometric Airbnb like, you know, 3D kind of style. So it's just, you know, just a lot of fun to be able to use the products we build at figma for our own interests, you know. And, you know, I'm a big TV addict, unfortunately. I love tv. These are just a couple of shows I've watched and, you know, it's just kind of fun to organize this stuff. And you can see we have like all kinds of scrolling and parallax effects and hover effects and, you know, these are some examples of sites that inspired me to make this from other people in the world, you know. And so, yeah, so that's one. That's. That was just like a really fun one. Again, it's called somethings, FYI. You can see it's just all here in one file. I can see it all in one place. So that's the first one.
- [22:29]
Aaron Walter
No, about like how much time does it take you to do something like this?
- [22:35]
Noah Levin
That's a good question. You know, I feel like it's sort of like in a lot of projects, how long do. Do design. Does design take? It can take a lot of time. I. This is for me, it's been like a. Kind of like it started off as I wanted something to internally test this new product we were building. And so it was a slow build. Like, I feel like, you know, one night a week, maybe, maybe two nights a month, I would jump in and you know, play around, explore, take inspiration, kind of bring things together. I don't know if I could tell you sort of how long it took end to end, but, but you know, when it's something you love doing, you just kind of come back to it when you want and, and you publish it and update it when you want. You know, if I ever want to add a new object, I just copy paste a frame here, add the image, and then I just hit publish and it's done and it's on the site. So it's, it's just kind of fun to have like this living document that kind of just exists on the web. I love that we, you know, can store so much great information there.
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Aaron Walter
Yeah. And very different to be able to see all of the different pages and states of your site in one place and live edit what, what is already published.
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Noah Levin
Yeah, it, it makes it sort of feel like you're just editing the web directly, you know, and, and it's, you know, and then we have all kinds of clever tricks for like, you know, if I change text in one area, just like with components, it can change it across responsive sizes and, and all that. So yeah, it's just, it's a lot of fun to, to have, you know, to get to use our own tools for things that we care about. You can see kind of the different inserts here. We were actively working on CMS right now and you know, and so that'll also be helpful for something like this where it's very content driven. So I'm excited to wire that up later. Yeah, you know, yeah, it's, it's, it's been a lot of fun. Yeah. A couple other quick examples. So I was a big fan of a company called Reed cv. Andy Chung and crew built a really cool product that they got acquired by Perplexity. And when they were going to shut down, I talked to Andy about, hey, like, can. Would you be okay if we like ported this to Figma sites. You know, a lot of designers have put time into this, and I don't know about you all, building a portfolio is like intimidating, right? Like, it's like it takes all this time. A lot of people struggle with it. It's this thing that always falls off your to do list. And I guess kind of feel like at a certain point, just like a list or a resume or LinkedIn is easier, but just with a little bit more creative control. Control and then you can build onto it. So rather than trying to, you know, boil the ocean or whatever they say, like, get the whole site done at once. Start with the basics, which is just like maybe the projects you've worked on in text form, and then add to it over time when you want. And so we built a plugin that lets you import your read CV stuff. But I wanted to show you code layers because that's kind of a really fun feature that really lets you bring things to life. And this is what I mean by like, start with the basics and like, build up to something more interactive and interesting. So in this case, we're using all the power of Figma make to let you prompt things into reality. In this case, I just wanted some fancy interactions where I move my mouse around and the text kind of animates and you can see my prompts over time. Just pretty simple. I want a fun hovering effect. I don't know what it is yet. Let's explore, you know, and go back and forth and create it. And then that's great because then when you actually want to play with it on a site, you can do that and it feels real. And you'll see I've added a few other code layers here. So up here on the top left, you can see that there's like a little bit of a hover effect, 3D effect going on. And as I move my cursor down, I have custom cursors, I have a custom animation all built with this code layers feature. And so all of it is done where I just kind of like have an area here and I just double click it and I can, you can see me kind of prompting the experience that I want into that section. And so, you know, a lot of fun just to make simple things, but bring them to life with some prompts is something really exciting. And then of course, all those cursors are just, you know, here, they're just referenced here and you can kind of update them on the fly. And so a few other things. My wedding site from a Few years ago I brought it into Figma site. So it's kind of fun to kind of see it come together. And one exciting news, my wife and I are expecting our first kid coming up, so actually the end of next month. And so I used to buzz actually for our baby shower, you know, putting together a bunch of options and working together on them. And I used this feature called Bulk Create to basically take a spreadsheet of icebreaker questions because we wanted everyone to come together in our baby shower and talk about things that were special to them, you know, when they were a kid, things that, you know, that would be interesting. So I just took a spreadsheet where Veena, then my wife, not even needing to know what Figma Buzz was, could input all these interesting questions and I could just bulk create it into this format and I can update them over time and change it. So just a lot of fun to kind of just bring a little bit of delight into, you know, our lives with some of these tools and you know. Yeah, so just wanted to share a couple of behind the scenes personal, you know, moments using our tools there. That's great.
- [27:23]
Aaron Walter
You get a ton of congratulations in the comments.
- [27:26]
Noah Levin
Yeah, that's very nice of you all. Thank you. Yeah, we're excited, baby girl. We're, we're really excited about it. Um, it's, it's, you know, we have no idea what we're doing. It's going to be fun. So just to close things out on this kind of, you know, this, this kind of pre prepared slide set of stuff that I wanted to show you all. Like, you know, obviously we're doing a lot with AI across all of our products. It's something we're, we're thinking a lot about and you'll notice this show up in each of our products and the beauty of having a platform like this is if you add something like the ability to edit an image using the latest image models, that's going to be helpful for you whether you're in a design file, a slide deck, a brainstorm. We think a lot of these things compound, right? You make a change in one and it's the same platform so it makes the change in a lot of them. We also are excited about how our tools bring people together and let you use the tools you're familiar with. If you're a designer, you know, and then switching to a mode that you're more comfortable with. If you are maybe a marketer, a pm, a developer, maybe not as comfortable with Figma tools. And the last thing I Wanted to say, I feel like when I got out of college, a lot of my impression of the corporate world or the world of building things looked something like this, where, you know, there's someone presenting and everyone's listening or not listening, but just one person, the loudest voice of the room talking. And, you know, I just feel like working can and should be fun. Like on some level, like we, we spend eight or more hours a day doing this, we should enjoy it. And so I think about the, the, the tools that we try to create for people and the experiences that we want to make as collaborative, inclusive, accessible, exciting. And if you look at that compared to that world where it's, it's maybe just like kind of one, one person presenting from their desktop, but instead, like we're creatively making a visual canvas of great stuff together, it just feels different, it feels nice, it feels fun. And so I hope that we can help you all take your ideas, make them real, navigate the. We sometimes call it the idea maze. Right. You have all these different ideas, you don't know where they're going to go. And we hope that our tools let you bring in the, you know, a lot of these ideas faster things like Figma make. You can almost skip to the end. You can just skip to the end and see was that idea actually interesting? Okay, cool, let's find out. And you know, if it was going to take you a week to build it, you would never know. But if it just takes you a little bit of time, you can start to explore this maze in more interesting ways. So that's. Yeah, that's my intro here. Excited to chat more and, you know, get into anything you're curious about, about the behind the scenes of this stuff or, you know, anything about teams and designing, whatever it is. Just, just really happy to be here and, and you know, to hear about what you're all interested in and what you want from us and, and just glad to spend the time.
- [29:57]
Aaron Walter
Fantastic. Well, thank you for that, Noah. That was such a wonderful overview. If you are new to design better AMAs or maybe new to Crowdcast, there's a little icon on the right question mark inside of a chat bubble. That's where you ask your questions. We've got a lot of questions already in there, so I think we're just going to jump right in so we don't. We can, can make it through as many as as we can here. Yeah, Eli, where do you want to start?
- [30:20]
Eli Woolery
Let's start with the, the top question. So in addition to asking questions you can upvote questions. Right now, the most uploaded one is from Liz and she's asking, what do you wish more junior UX designers understood about career growth? No, I'm sure you've seen folks at all stages of their career, so. Yeah, what do you.
- [30:38]
Noah Levin
Yeah, sure, sure have. And we actually have an early career program at Figma. We've been hiring interns and, and new grad since. Since even when I started. So we've been investing in early career talent for a long time and something we really believe in. You know, I think a lot of times when you're early in your career, you think about, you're looking for this, like, checklist maybe, like, you might be like, okay, what does it take to get promoted? Like, what is it? What do I need to get to get to my next stage of my career? And that's totally understandable. And, and you know, there's a lot of different frameworks people look at when they're doing that. But I think when you're early in your career, it can be almost overwhelming to know what to focus on. Like, oh, should I do this? Like, should I do that? Should I invest in being a better storyteller, visual designer, prototyper? And I think instead of trying to do everything, you know, just initially, if you can just try to focus on being helpful, like, and using whatever one of those things you feel comfortable in in that early stage and not being afraid to use that superpower, whether that again, was how to tell a great story or make something look nice or whatever. And, and try to remember that not everything has to be your idea. Like, when I, when I was getting started, I used to feel so protective about, like, oh, I'm the designer. Like, it's my job to, like, answer every question. And, like, and that's a lot of weight to put on yourself. But as we said earlier, like, nothing's great is made alone. So, like, I, early in my career, I got lucky to work with these great engineers who had great design ideas. And rather than pushing them away and being like, oh, that's not your job, that's my job. If you just listen and you just kind of be like, oh, wait, what is. What, sorry, what's that idea you had? Like, and take it into account, I feel like you can get a lot further. Like, when you, when you see yourself as a helper, that's at least just how I operate in the world. Like, I just like to be like, yeah, I want to help. All right, what are we doing? I think you can, you can accomplish a lot and, and so you don't have to do everything, I guess is the main, main answer I have to this question. Like just try to be helpful, you know, use whatever it is you are comfortable with to, to make a difference and you know, and if it's helpful for you. We actually open sourced our, our career ladder at Figma, if that's interesting, so we can share the link in the chat if you're curious to take a look. We open sourced it, we use figjam and so if that's interesting or helpful to you, you can see how we see career progression at figma.
- [32:44]
Aaron Walter
That would be a very valuable resource. Yeah, we'd love to share that with everybody here. Oh, Eli, I think you're muted.
- [32:54]
Eli Woolery
Sorry about that, my vestibule was going off earlier. So a related question is, you know.
- [33:00]
Noah Levin
What would you, what, what would you.
- [33:01]
Eli Woolery
Say to a designer or developer who worries about how AI will affect their job, role and career opportunities? This was something Aaron and I were intending to ask you is, you know, these blurring of boundaries between design and dev and I'm sure that's what you're thinking about that in a product way a lot. But on the human side, how are you thinking about somebody that might be wanting to really prepare themselves for this very different career landscape?
- [33:24]
Noah Levin
Yeah, great question and very relevant and timely topic. So my belief is that it's getting easier and easier to make software right. You can almost prompt software into existence now, but that's not always like if you think about what we do as designers, we're trying to make things useful, simple, usable, friendly. If you have an explosion of software, let's say you have a million apps you could download on your phone, well then what becomes important? Right? What's important to you in like an attention economy when, when you know, you don't want a million experiences like that, you probably just want a few meaningful ones, well then design is what stands out the most. Design like your brand, your. The way you solve that problem, the way that you innovate and create something new. And the reason I'm starting with that context is that I actually think this might sound like surprising to people. I actually think it's the best time to be a designer right now. Like there is so much demand, there's so much need for this because everyone is interested in participating in the process. They want to create things, but they often they need someone with the ingenuity, the talent, the creativity of a designer to help make their ideas better. And I think that's even More true now in a world where you have more problems to work on. Like, you can't move through the world and not as designers, we're cursed sometimes to notice everything we wish were better. Like, you know, like, whether it's like, you know, working with our banks, institutions, or forms or whatever in the world, there's clearly room for improvement. You know, while obviously AI has improved a lot, there's. There's still no shortage of problems, and so there's no shortage of needs for designers. So that's the first thing is, like, let's keep that context in mind that actually designers are very needed right now, and we need you to keep making things. To keep making things better. You know, what's. That's the beauty of what we do. The second thing is it's totally natural to be a little nervous or afraid of change. Right? This happens a lot. And especially when some of these tools, like, we're changing the way that we might move around the world as quickly as we have been. It's unsettling. I don't think humans were, like, designed for that kind of rapid change, but actually, like, probably the best thing you could do, I think, is approach some of this stuff with curiosity and with play. Like, try to just. Just play with it, try it out. It's. If you think of it as, like, this foreign alien material, you're, like, trying to figure out what it is and what it can do, what these models are good at. Most of us didn't go to school studying machine learning, you know, or, you know, we don't understand neural nets, whatever. So, like, how do you. How do you, as a designer show up? Well, you just try. You just play around. You try to understand where these models do great. So whatever, you know, use whatever tools you, you, you want to, and I know there's a lot out there. Use whatever one you want to start with and just play. Just try it out. Like, if you work in a design team, maybe ask your. Your manager, your team, hey, can we just take a Friday, Take the morning? Can we just, like, try one of these new tools, you know, or try a few of them and just talk, Talk to each other. What did we learn? So I, I think the best way to move through anxiety is action. Like, the best way to move through, like, uncertainty and, and not like, at least. Personally, I think it's like, you just feel better when instead of ruminating and, like, worrying about what's going to happen to us, like, you just try. Like, you just. I know it's not always that Simple. But it's just, I just feel like that's, that's a start, you know, and that's what I would say, I think.
- [36:31]
Eli Woolery
I think that's a great point. No, and that's something. You know, we've been running these workshops that are sort of design plus AI work for teams at Google and Waymo, and these teams are building these tools, but they often don't have time to really play around with it or, you know, explore how they might, you know, use them within their workflow as a team. So if you can do that, like Noah said, get a day together or Shameless plug, come run one of the design workshops with us. Happy to do that. It's, it's just an opportunity to explore, get some creative confidence and, you know, it's, it's fun too.
- [37:08]
Aaron Walter
Absolutely. All right, let's jump into another question.
- [37:12]
Eli Woolery
All right, here's our current top voted question. What are your recommendations for bridging the gap between design system, our design system, and the component Library storybook and GitHub. They're not in sync and design to development time is slow for enhancements and new components.
- [37:28]
Noah Levin
Yeah, great question, Heather. This is, um, a big focus for us actually. So when we built Dev mode, a huge part of what we wanted to do was make the relationship between designers and developers and the tools we each use more symmetric. Right. Make them feel more fluid and collaborative. So if you haven't already tried it, Code Connect is one way to, to get at the area you're interested in. It's, it's. We can share a link in the chat to a handbook we wrote to, to kind of work through some of these challenges. You know, obviously like when you think about what the holy grail is here, you just want everything to always be in sync. Like whatever is you're designing should match what's in production. Whatever's in production should match what you're designing. And we know it takes a lot of work to get there, especially if you work at a larger company and there's a lot of different, you know, componentry to work through. But we are actively working a lot in this area and we think it's important for your design language, your design system to mirror what your developers are building. Of course. And so we think Code Connect is a good start, recommend checking it out and we are actively heavily investing in areas like it to make that even better.
- [38:32]
Aaron Walter
What you were showing, you know, you're talking about Figma make and design systems, like connecting that stuff together. That is amazing. That is super exciting.
- [38:42]
Noah Levin
Yeah, we feel like, you know, there are just entire organizations, design systems, teams. Right. If you're a company like Google or Microsoft, there might be like a hundred of you. If you're a smaller team, there might be five of you. That's your every day is building this like system that can scale the design language of your company. And, and we've invested so much at Figma in building tools for that. And so it's. So it's only natural that we should make sure that that is helpful in the AI world and that the investments you've made. I think of it as, look, AI is great when it has context. Like it can't operate without context. And design system is amazing context. You've already written guidelines and descriptions and you know, you've given so much context, it just makes sense that these models should be able to leverage that.
- [39:25]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, and what you said too, that a third of your customer base are developers. You know, presumably developers are in Figma on a regular basis and there's such a blurring of roles where designers are vibe coding and developers are, you know, vibe designing. So the idea of having your design system connected to AI prompts would help a developer work through, you know, maybe these more esoteric pieces of an app that a designer might not be able to have the time, the bandwidth to get to and get pretty close, like get to a pretty good spot following a standard design system.
- [40:06]
Noah Levin
That's right, yeah. I mean so much of design is communication and language and right now our teams are not always speaking the same language. Right. The ways that they think about building, you know, might be sometimes different. The words we use, the way we describe how something should look and feel. So hopefully over time, like you said, there's a blurring and a blending because behind that language we actually have goals. And those goals are actually the same usually, like we all want to build successful, helpful, easy to use, performant, fast, delightful products. And doing that is a shared goal. Whether you're identify as a designer, a developer, a pm, a researcher. And so yeah, I totally agree. There's, there's kind of this, this blurring happening here where, you know, designers should be able to be more comfortable writing code. I also believe hot take, not so hot take. I don't know, developers should be designing too. Like they understand the nuance of interaction design because they're the ones building it most of the time. And so it should be symmetric. We should be building our designs, they should be designing things they're building. I, that's my belief is that we should be working more collaboratively.
- [41:09]
Eli Woolery
Awesome. All right, so let's see. Here's our next top voted question. How do you think about hiring and scaling design teams in the AI age?
- [41:20]
Noah Levin
Yeah, we've been talking a lot about this in a lot of different ways. And I think it's like hiring, scaling, I would use another word, like enabling.
- [41:28]
Eli Woolery
Right?
- [41:29]
Noah Levin
Like, it's not always about, like, scale and growth. Sometimes it's also just about how do we as designers feel empowered, be more efficient, use these tools to, to do our jobs better? And there is, there's a lot to do there. And, and again, so I think the first thing I think about is how do we inspire people? I'm not the kind of person who, who likes to lead by, like, mandates. Like, you all must use these AI tools or we're not going to hire you if you haven't, if you haven't like personally built something with cursor. Like, obviously we look to people who are curious and who are playing with these new tools and who are exploring and who are willing to be bold and create. But we also think a great way to lead is to inspire. And a great way to do that is even as leaders, as, as whatever, directors, managers, VPs, I personally believe we should be hands on, not in like a overly the top man, micromanaging way, whatever, but we should, we should lead by example and we should be willing to be courageous and try some of these tools and to show what's possible. And so I think there's a big part of our philosophy here. We're trying to figure out, well, how do we do that? Like, what are the right ways to. You both get access to these tools to let people try them, to encourage people to use them and to see really what's possible when you do that. So, yeah, I think there's, When I think of hiring, scaling again, to me, I think it's more around enabling. How do we just make sure that people are successful? So one example, we are now actively looking at a role called AI Model Designer. Okay, what does that mean? Like, what, what. Why are we hiring like an AI model design? What is that? And you're gonna, I, my belief is you're gonna see this, you're gonna see more and more companies hire this role or look to their designers to do it. And what this means to me is we need to figure out where we have this new technology, right? This new capability. And designers need to work to understand it, to shape it, to sculpt it, to mold it, to get the best work you can out of it, which means understanding what these models are good at, what means. So I don't know how many of you in the audience know what like evals are. Like evals are. When you're working in AI models, you are assessing something in output from your prompt, right? You have a prompt, you have an output from what your ideal state was. And someone has to decide, was that good or was that not good? And you know, if you're working in a text experience, you could or like in a medical field, there might be, was the answer accurate? If you're like us and working in a design field, you're like, is this design good? Which can be subjective, right? It can be. How objective versus subjective is it? There are some things that are, I think, more objective, like clean typography and hierarchy and so on, but we need designers to actually sit with ML researchers directly and live and breathe these evals, these processes around it and things like, you know, system prompts. I don't know how many of you work in are using AI tools in your companies, but generally there is a system prompt which is just human language, right? Text behind the system that is steering and guiding the way you're using the model. And I would love for more designers and UX writers or whoever to get involved in the system prompt. Like, why not? Like, why not understand how this stuff is getting built? Because increasingly it's plain language. It's language that you all hopefully know and are comfortable with. So I'm a big believer that you're going to need whether you are a model company or not, right? You don't have to be, you know, OpenAI, anthropic, meta, you know, whatever to do this. Like, you will already be wrapping around these models or fine tuning them, so you might as well get comfortable understanding what evals are, what system prompts are, how to guide them, how to steer them, and how to train these models to do a better job. Like, if we're just trying to create better outcomes, why not get closer to the work? So it's new to us, it's new to you, it's due to everyone. Everyone. No one knows what they're doing in some of this stuff, I think, if we're truly honest. But we need to get in there and be valuable and understand how to help. So I would guess that increasingly we're going to see roles like this in the future.
- [45:18]
Aaron Walter
It's fascinating.
- [45:22]
Eli Woolery
Right? Keeping myself on mute. What resources do you recommend to keep up with all these new apps and features? It's overwhelming YouTube channels. Other I have one resource I'll add in the chat, but what do you use?
- [45:37]
Noah Levin
No.
- [45:37]
Eli Woolery
To explore new tools.
- [45:40]
Noah Levin
Yeah, I, you know, social media is honestly where I spend the most time. So I would say like X and Threads are probably the two places that I like. Kind of look for what designers are making using sharing. You know, obviously there's things like product hunt and other places where people share their the latest and greatest. Definitely there's YouTube channels. TikToks really great people helping to teach these new tools. So I think, you know, once you've identified a way to try something like it, to me it's like less that I care about getting the fire hose of daily information. You can, even if you work in a design team, there's probably someone in your team who's going to be doing that naturally they might be the one that's already in the channel being like, oh, have you tried this new thing? So it doesn't always have to be you, but, but once you hear about it, just I encourage you to find space and time to try it out. And if you need to, if you're worried about, well, I never have the time. Maybe there's a way to use it for work, for the project you have in front of you or for your personal life or whatever it might be and trying to apply it to something where there's already a natural goal so you feel like that time was invested towards something if there wasn't otherwise time to play and explore.
- [46:46]
Eli Woolery
That's great. I'm dropping the link in here. This is a site called Studio Labs that sort of, it's kind of like product hunt for AI design tools. So that's one place that pretty regularly updated.
- [46:59]
Aaron Walter
I like Noah's recommendation here of finding a personal project that you're excited about and then, you know, building that. That's kind of what Eli and I have been doing. We're using AI, a variety of AI tools in so many different ways. Just on fun little, little things, you know, it could be I want to learn something.
- [47:19]
Noah Levin
So you Start to use ChatGPT or.
- [47:22]
Aaron Walter
Cursor or whatever it is in different ways. Might be that you want to build something very quickly. It's just like finding a personal project and pursuing that, making it a priority, spending some time every day. I find that to be the best I do, you know, look on YouTube for some videos just to see how some people are solving problems. And that's some inspiration. But the greatest inspiration is just having something you like to do and see if you can do it with the existing tools.
- [47:52]
Eli Woolery
Yeah, it can even be, like, a really silly idea. I've mentioned this on other AMAs, but, you know, at one point I was listening to Rick Rubin's podcast. I thought he, he just has a very unique style. We'll say. Amazing. Interesting. I thought, let's be cool to make a Rick Rubin synthesizer. So I pulled a few samples and, you know, dropped it into ChatGPT and designed this synthesizer within, you know, 20 minutes worth. So it can be silly ideas like that that, you know, you just want to make something, you know, go do it. It's easy these days.
- [48:21]
Aaron Walter
Yeah. Fantastic. Next question.
- [48:26]
Eli Woolery
All right, let's see here. Aaron is the one standing out to you. We've got a couple here at the top I'm trying to get to some other folks haven't answered ask questions yet.
- [48:37]
Aaron Walter
This one's pretty broad here from Liz. What emerging trends in design are you most excited about?
- [48:45]
Noah Levin
Yeah, great question. I think there are. There are like, different kinds of trends, I guess there's like, how we. How we work kind of trends, and then there's sort of like what we make kind of trends. Right. And I think I'll. Maybe I'll answer each of them. So for how we work trends, I have always been a huge fan of prototyping. You know, that, what do they say a prototype is worth a thousand meetings? I absolutely believe that. And, and historically, I used to teach designers how to code. And I. That used to be the way that I thought the best prototypes could be made. And if you think about emerging trends and moments that you. You might not have to code at all because these tools are so good at prompting things, but using code behind the scenes. And so I, you know, whether that's through code editors and submitting code yourself with tools like Cursor or Copilot or Windsurfer, whatever, or using figma make to prompt something to prototype it so that you can show up at that meeting with a prototype instead of a bunch of mockups. It's just easier. The fidelity of feedback gets better. So from that trend, I would say prototyping is my answer easily any day. Like, that's to me, so, so helpful is to explore using the materials that your end users will be using the actual product. And the closer we can get to simulating that experience, the better our design ideas will be. So that's the how we work trend that I would say, I think for the what. What we make piece trends. That's a good one. So love it or hate it? I'M a fan of liquid glass. I'm going to say it. I. I'm a. I'm. I'm inspired by what Apple's doing, and I'll tell you why. You know, the last, like, 10 years of design tools, you've had what, rectangles and shapes, vectors, right? You've had text, you know, you've got color hierarchy, type, whatever around that. We haven't really given designers that many new means of expression. And over this time, right, like, we've enabled things like design systems to make it a lot easier to scale the work using those primitives. But there's so many more materials in the world. There's so many. If you look at the world around you and you feel inspired by the way wind moves through, you know, grass or trees, like, all this stuff, like, we don't express that in our. In our software. We could. And I think what Apple did, what. What I thought was really cool and I know there's a lot of work to do. I think people are way too harsh on betas. Like, it's. They've got time to. To iron out the kinks. I know that it's not accessible right now, and I believe that they'll improve that. They have been, but they took inspiration from the real world, the way that things refract, you know, the way that things. The thing that things look with different physical materials and they found a way using things like shaders and other, you know, interesting code tactics to render that in software. And so I'm a big fan of things like shaders, a big fan of designers getting new materials to work with. And I think this is helpful because if everything in the world starts to look the same and everything starts to feel the same, we often want to feel inspired. We want both familiar things. There's nothing, sometimes there's nothing bad with consistency. Things feeling familiar, that's. That's great. Like, of course we need patterns like tab bars in our mobile apps, but at a certain point, people also crave something new. They crave something that makes them feel something. Right? And so I'm a big fan of this trend with liquid glass that Apple's doing. I think it's cool that the company invested and designed so heavily to explore these different kinds of materials. And I think that that is one of hopefully hundreds and hundreds of materials that we can start to play with. And so, again, I'm very confident that they will improve the accessibility of the feature over time. It's a very early version. They've committed and shown a commitment to that in the past. They're at the forefront often with a lot of their tooling. It'll take time. So we have to as an industry be patient and of course explore and be creative. But yeah, I just think there's something really magical about having new materials to work with at our disposal. Absolutely. Cool.
- [52:47]
Eli Woolery
So we definitely have probably more questions than we can get to this time. We'll try to be kind of behind the scenes, answer some of them if we can with you know, a support article or link if there's a clear, you know, answer there.
- [52:59]
Noah Levin
Let's see.
- [53:00]
Eli Woolery
Here's a question from. It's kind of interesting one. Print. Print design. I used to do that a bit with a magazine. We do a lot of print work and we're wondering if Figma plants introduce more tools to support print focused work workflows in the future.
- [53:14]
Noah Levin
Yeah, that's a good question. You know we've, we've would definitely love to hear more from you or anyone doing print what you're looking for, what kinds of stuff you need. You know, we've, we've heard sort of requests around things around CMYK and different kinds of, you know, color profiling work. You know already in Figma you'll notice that in the default frame templates, both in Figma Buzz, which could be great for this kind of use case as well as Figma design, you'll see that there's tabloid paper, other kinds of defaults and so you don't have to think too heavily about pixel conversion. So yeah, it's definitely an interesting one. Can't speak to like our feature of math in general, but I'm always interested in hearing what you want to make from print materials and, and what it is that you feel like you're craving and what's missing. Personally I've used in my own personal life like Figma for a lot of, you know, print like materials for our wedding. Like all the signage, all the, you know, all the different place cards and menus I designed myself all in Figma and so I think it's already possible today but there's absolutely more to do if you and would love to hear what, what you're looking for.
- [54:11]
Aaron Walter
We too have used Figma for a limited number of print things and it's been great for us. So yeah, this one, the next one here from Mike Neff I I resonate with. He's asking about, he says even with, even with the addition of AI building and polishing tables and Figma is time consuming and repetitive. We designed so many tables. How's FIGMA working to make that experience?
- [54:37]
Noah Levin
Great.
- [54:38]
Aaron Walter
I've worked with tables in figma. During COVID I worked with the Africa CDC creating a tracker for the continent of Africa for cases for each country, and lots of data for epidemiologists. So we worked with a lot of big tables. I found some great plugins that helped me. But maybe you've got some other recommendations.
- [55:01]
Noah Levin
Yeah, great question. There's definitely a lot of improvement we have to make here. You know, it got a little bit easier in some ways with grids which shipped at config this year, but we know that that's far from the holy grail of tables and it's definitely something we talk about a lot. I know Dylan, the CEO personally cares a lot about this use case and brings it up often as something he would love for us to improve. So it comes up often. We know that it's a common use case. Uh, we also know that we've, you know there's different kinds of tables. Right. Even in figjam, you have a table primitive in slides as well. And we have to sort of reconcile sometimes, like what kind of table primitives are right for what context. And sometimes a lightweight, simple one works great. Other times you actually need a lot of detail and fidelity because each cell contains its own component and so lots to explore. Grids might help you out for now and hopefully more to come.
- [55:49]
Eli Woolery
Yeah, great.
- [55:55]
Aaron Walter
On mute.
- [55:58]
Eli Woolery
I think I've learned by now we've only done this, you know, 50 times. Okay, so let's see here. There was one that I thought was a good one. Sorry, I'm losing it amidst the stream of questions here. Bear with me. Okay, yeah. So Noah, you mentioned third of your user is developers and another third is designers. Every product requires collaborations between design and dev. You share your experience or any advice to create more collaborative, fun experiences or relationships between design and devs. She's finding tension more prevalent in many work environments.
- [56:35]
Noah Levin
Yeah, yeah, it's a great question and I think it's probably true of a lot of different kinds of relationships in the world of like, how do you have good communication, how do you improve, how to work together? And, you know, I think a lot of it's about understanding each other. So a lot about, like, well, what, where are they coming from? What are their goals, what's important to them? Hopefully they'll show the same interest in you and what you're trying to build as a designer throughout. A couple things I often like to. If they haven't, people want to Feel heard, right? And if they have an idea and they feel like you're ignoring it because you believe it's a bad idea, and it could be a bad idea, I don't know, even just taking a minute to hear them out and try it out. Especially these new tools. Figma, make whatever you can make something feel pretty, pretty real pretty quickly, if only to say, you know what, here's why I think that isn't a great idea. And so trying to not immediately show up with resistance is one, one thing to do and, and you know, making sure that they feel connected to part of the problem. A lot of times, you know, designers will say like, you know, I wish I was in the room earlier, right? Or I wish I was involved earlier. Developers often will feel the same way. And that's not everyone. Some developers are actually like, you know what? I just need to know what I need to build. I don't care about everything behind it. That's fine. A lot of developers and increasingly so care. They want to be a part, you know, of the process of why we're doing what we're doing. They want to feel the value that they spent, think about how many hours they spend fixing bugs or trying to make something real. If you didn't care about what it was for, you probably wouldn't either put as much work into it or wouldn't feel as good. So I think just involving them early, I know it's kind of classic advice, but I think it's true. Getting them involved in making designs together even and being creative and discussing things. But, but I think it's hard to give blanket advice for how to work with developers, unfortunately. I find because different developers have different, have different ways of working, different teams have different goals, different companies have different processes. So those are a couple ideas to get you going. But, but you'd really have to debug the specifics of that relationship.
- [58:31]
Aaron Walter
There's a proverb, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. I think that very much applies to this designer developer relationship. A prototype can be a super powerful thing, but it can also give the impression to your developer partners that you've already got it figured out. Now just go execute on what we have here. So to the degree you can sit down together and work through some ideas where they have input, they're involved in that creation process that can be huge and just building some bridges.
- [59:04]
Eli Woolery
So we're getting close to the wrap up here. There's, there's definitely the list of questions and We've tried to, we'll try to provide some links in the after, you know, after effects when we send this out. But, Noah, is there anything that we haven't touched on that you'd like to answer or any questions that stand out to you here?
- [59:25]
Noah Levin
Yeah, let me scan through the questions and see if there's any, any ones I can kind of quickly get to or end on. Let's see. Yeah, and these are great. And keep it coming. I mean, I think as I mentioned earlier, like, we, we have learned so much from the community and truly, genuinely want to know what it is that you, that you need from us, what you're hoping for, what you want to see. So there's no right or wrong way to get that to us. You can use social media, you can use our for forums, you can use that little question mark on the bottom right of the tool and submit it there. Just, I think, honestly that's the most important thing to me to end on is like, don't be shy. Like, I like you have so many good ideas as designers. You probably have an intuition of what you wish we did. Let us know. You know, I can't say how important it is for us as we shape our roadmaps to know what it is that you're looking for. Now, it's not always about that, obviously, the faster horses thing. Sure. But, but we've really learned a lot from you all as a community and hope to continue to.
- [60:29]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, absolutely. There are a couple small questions in here, like baseline shift on lines of text and rims and M's for text sizing, those sorts of things, which.
- [60:42]
Noah Levin
Those.
- [60:42]
Aaron Walter
Are interesting and useful.
- [60:44]
Noah Levin
We will collect all of these and I will send them internally. And so, yeah, keep it coming in the chat or Q and A, whatever. We'll definitely make sure this gets back to the team.
- [60:53]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, I've got one question here from Liz. I know Liz asked a question earlier, but I think this is a good one to end on. What key lessons did you take from working on the latest version of figma?
- [61:07]
Noah Levin
Oh, that's a good one. Yeah. You know, we're getting. If you think about the experience of having eight products at figma now, it, you know, my methods of, of helping to, you know, improve them or guide or shape the team have to change because I can no longer, you know, be involved in every detail of every product. There's so many products, there's so much to do, so much to learn. So I think I've learned a lot about, you know, choosing a few, choosing Picking a few and delegating, of course, and distributing that responsibility across them. Figuring out, you know, how to still be helpful and help my team be helpful throughout. Throughout doing that. You know, I think we have an increasing audience in the company, right. If you think about all the different people coming to Figma and I think we're continuing to learn about what those different audiences need. And so that's a big lesson for me is like, for example, with buzz and marketers, like I haven't personally spent enough time in my career understanding the needs of marketers and how they get the word of your company out and tell those stories. And, and so I think there's a lot of lessons about. Oh, right, like probably need to start understanding that. I think we understand designers somewhat well, but maybe not all of these other creative fields. So I think that's a big lesson too is like how do we invest more time in understanding those different audiences as well.
- [62:27]
Aaron Walter
Fantastic. It's a great place to wrap. Noah, thank you so much for taking time to chat with us today.
- [62:34]
Noah Levin
You're.
- [62:35]
Aaron Walter
You started us with this, this point that Figma's driving forces community and I think this speaks volumes to that point that spending time here with the Design Better community and a lot of other folks who joined us for the first time. If you're new to Design Better, maybe you've not signed up or you want to go deeper into design. Visit designbetterpodcast.com Lots and lots of great.
- [62:59]
Noah Levin
Stuff that's there for free.
- [63:01]
Aaron Walter
And if you want to go deeper into the books and all the recordings from our past AMAs, they're all there to explore. But thank you again, Noah. Thank you everybody for attending, for asking questions. Just a reminder, this was recorded. This recording will be right here at this exact URL in your browser shortly. It's just going to take a minute for the video to process. We'll email it out to anyone who registered and we'll post it on our website shortly too. So thank you one and all.
- [63:30]
Noah Levin
We greatly appreciate it.
- [63:31]
Aaron Walter
Thank you, Noah. Thank you, Figma. Thanks for bringing us lots of cool design tools.
- [63:37]
Noah Levin
Thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. This has been awesome.
- [63:40]
Eli Woolery
Thanks everybody.
- [63:41]
Aaron Walter
Take care.