In June, the designers of Redonk got to attended Figma’s “Config” Conference in San Francisco, CA. My fellow designer, Sarah, covered the overall experience of the conference–from the flow of events to the pain points and advice for future conferences. If you haven’t read it yet, you should definitely check it out. The goal of this blog is to go more in depth on the new releases from Figma and some highlights from my favorite sessions.
Figma Product Launch Keynote
This year, Figma announced quite a few new updates that are sure to be game changers–in good and maybe not so good ways. One of the main topics was artificial intelligence (A.I.) It’s here and we must embrace it whether we like it or not. Figma is embracing it and attempting to incorporate it into their products to make our lives easier. By adding an Actions panel to the toolbar designers will be able to use A.I. to do a multitude of actions like make designs, prototypes, rename layers, replace content, etc. The “make design” feature is to help designers get some initial ideas going by creating designs based on prompts. It will even generate imagery within the design if it calls for it. While this feature is impressive, it has already gotten a lot of negative feedback and has been pulled from Figma Beta due to copyright infringement claims. I am excited to try out the rest of the A.I. features though, especially the “rename layers” feature. This got the biggest applause out of everything being released at the conference because this is every designer’s dream come true. Another other cool A.I. feature is the ability to fill in generated placeholder text, which will make wireframing easier when there is very little content to go off of.
Image Credit: Figma
A few other changes worth noting are suggest auto layouts, UI kits, and a redesigned UI for Figma. I, personally, am very excited for suggest auto layouts because I believe it will help speed up our design process and be able to keep spacing consistent throughout our designs. The UI kits will also help speed up the design process, specifically for mobile, and will also speed up development. There are 3 kits being added: Apple IOS 18, Google Material 3, and Simple Design System. Not only will these kits add pre-made components to our designs, but they will also come in with the code already written when viewed in Dev Mode.
Of course, we have to talk about the updates for Dev Mode. After being released last year, Dev Mode has helped our team communicate more clearly what designs are ready for code and has helped to give our developers more information needed for coding. Figma is elevating Dev Mode even more by adding a “Ready for Dev” view that only shows what’s ready for coding, as well as a history of the edits made with the ability to leave comments for the developers. There is also the option now to view responsive prototypes which will help developers easily see how our designs should function. Finally, I believe the best dev feature being added will be Code Connect: the ability to link your Figma file and your coding file. With this, developers can code a component once and be able to view the code in Figma. This ensures that repeated components, such as buttons, will have the same properties and can be easily found within the design file.
Last but not least in the Keynote Launch was Figma Slides (or Flides). This was another great release that all of us are looking forward to using. Now we have the ability to create beautiful PDFs or slideshows within Figma AND we can export the PDF at a reasonable file size. This also allows us to import prototypes within the slideshow, creating a seamless way to present ideas and concepts to clients. Flides also has pre-made templates to help us create presentations even faster. Our team has already used Flides to create client presentations and so far, so good!
Image Credit: Figma
Imaginations At Play Session
My first session after the opening keynote was “Imaginations At Play.” The first speaker was Simon Green, a visual effects artist who has worked to create some of the most intricate creatures in blockbuster movies such as “Dune”, “Aquaman”, “Eternals” and many more. He spoke on his process for pulling inspiration from nature to fuel his creative endeavors and showed us how we can all draw inspiration for our own designs. It was very cool to see how all of the small details that we can find in plants and animals can come together to create these fantastical creatures in our favorite movies. The second speaker of the session was Aashrey Sharma, a UX Designer at Epic Games. He walked us through a cool Figma plugin that allows us to create prototypes with simulated video game controls. He also went more in depth on the thinking behind game interfaces and the navigation within the video games.
From Keyframes to Keycaps
This was a session that I was looking forward to the most. As an amateur animator, I was very excited to hear from Ben Fryc, a 3D/motion designer for Wealthsimple. He showed a lot of his work for Wealthsimple and walked through his process for animating some of his designs. He started by creating one animation per day as an exercise to both push his skillset and his creative thinking. He shared some of the tools he uses every day in his animations and inspired everyone to use animation as another way of storytelling. The next speaker of the session was Michael Di Genova, co-founder of Work Louder. Michael is a pharmacologist from Canada who helped create Figma’s first-ever hardware product: a keyboard. Along with a graphic designer from Italy, he taught himself how to build physical keyboards and how to manage an online business selling said keyboards. His talk reminded us that you can learn anything at any age if you put your mind to it. Fun fact: Ben made animations of the keyboard that Michael created to help market it.
Designing for Everything
The opening keynotes on both days were full of amazing speakers and content. Day 2 did not disappoint. The first two speakers from The Browser Company were Karla Mickens Cole and Nashilu Mouen. Along with a stunning presentation of their work, they shared the importance of leaving fingerprints in all of our products. It’s important to tell a story and keep the human element in everything we do. The next part of the opening session was a sit down talk with Refik Anadol, a motion installation artist, on the intersection of art and technology. His artwork is truly beautiful and immersive. He has done many installations and pop-up exhibitions at places such as the Sphere in Las Vegas, Casa Batlló in Barcelona, and MOMA in New York. His artwork appears to be alive, constantly evolving, and as if it’s coming off of the canvas. I think that his artwork was the most captivating thing that I experienced at the whole conference. To close out the opening session was Simone Giertz, the self-proclaimed “Queen of Shitty Robots”. You may have seen some of her videos on YouTube where she tried to create a robot to accomplish a simple task. She has since expanded into inventing other products that could improve everyday life such as a clothes hanger that can fold in half, a hat that can expand into a reusable shopping bag, and my favorite: the Truckla, in which she turned her Tesla car into a truck (prior to the ugly Cybertruck invention). Her hilarious videos and unstoppable attitude left us all feeling like we could do anything, even if we did it terribly.
Design for the Big Screen
This was another session that I was looking forward to. The first speaker was Jessica Hische, a lettering artist and best-selling author. Her talk was one of the most beneficial as a designer, in my opinion. She walked us through some of her process for creating logos, how to help modernize existing logos while maintaining their essence, and why it’s important to take your time and pay attention to your craftsmanship. The next speaker was Emonee LaRussa, a 2x Emmy winning motion graphics artist, who was responsible for animating the most recent Super Bowl’s screen graphics in the stadium. It was fascinating to hear about the process of how she was selected to create the motion graphics for the Super Bowl, how she was able to streamline the process (since she only had 2 weeks to get everything ready to go!), and how she overcame some challenges along the way.
Overall, most of the sessions were inspirational, informative, and entertaining. As with every conference, not every speaker will connect with you. There were a few sessions where I wish I had signed up for a different one. I would definitely schedule more of the Figma new feature deep dives next time, but luckily we can all watch every session we missed on YouTube.
