Recap : Fireside Chat With Noah Levin, Design Manager at Figma
This was a fireside chat with no fire to warm our body. The fire was in our belly, and in our hearts. Beautiful things happen when you have a passion that drives you, a community that supports said passion and a global company that provides the platform to channel your creativity. The fire inside just rages on, bringing the world to bow at your feet.
About The Session
In the spirit of learning from others, the session is centered on Figma’s ease of use and design best practices. You get to ask questions relating to the platform that engineers and designers who actually built the tool will answer. Nothing beats having access to product member, because he knows the constraints that had to be considered before decisions are made.
About Noah
Noah Levin is a design veteran with more than 15 years professional experience designing UI/UX for some our favorite companies including NASA and Google. He has a background in Human-Computer Interaction and Information Systems, a degree he bagged from Carnegie Mellon many years ago.
He is currently a design manager at Figma, putting him in the right position to tell the community about current and future trends, and how best to use the tool they have built.
Let’s get down to business
At last, I can tell you everything that happened during the session. *cracks knuckles* It started with Noah, introducing himself and the work he does at Figma. He was really gentle and down-to-earth, even with his years of experience he still manages to come out as wanting to learn from us.
Just as we were getting comfortable, David Ukauwa the de facto Commissioner of Design hit-the-ground-running by asking Noah about his design process at Figma. The question was a perfect mix of getting into the mind of an experienced designer and learning how a company that builds design tools actually design themselves.
And Noah blew us away with his responses. In his words
“before opening Figma, I try to understand the problem. It all starts with a problem.”
He explains that once a problem is defined with its constraint and goal to be achieved, the actual solution provision is divided into two stages.
“First, we research on what has been done, what were the result(s), what are the tools needed to work on this problem.”
After the research, “we focus on providing solutions using Figma.”
His process awfully sounded like what some of us already do, until he said
“fortunately, these processes are collaborative.”
One of the values of collaboration in anything one does, is the possibility of instant feedback. If one is vying of-course, someone on the team will immediately raise the alarm.
Just as he finished detailing his process, another question popped up “…concerning research, would it be right to pick elements from different designs to combine into something new? “
You see Noah is really a great guy, who knows what he’s talking about. He answered simply.
“That’s a great question! That’s very true.”
He replied and continued by referencing an authority on the topic
“There’s a book that blew my mind many years ago about this called Steal Like an Artist. There’s a YouTube video of the author, Austin Kleon, speaking about it here.”
Another note on collaboration is its prevention of literacy block. You know writers block 😐 ? Yes, there is also Reading Block, Coding Block and definitely Designing Block. The feeling of not knowing where and how to start an activity. With Figma, since you are working with others, they most likely have started designing already, so you just see what is going on and jump on the wagon 👌.
As the session progressed, people were asking more about “How to do X in Figma.” One that stood was about (image) raster editing. To which Noah gave us a lovely gif to explain how to crop images.
The feeling of learning a new trick is ecstatic. And downright surreal.
One part of this session the community is going to cherish was when he was asked about his experience during his student days at Carnegie Mellon. It gave us an insight into the requirements and demands of the course. And it took our man down memory lane. He remembered how his class were paired with students from other departments, including but not limited to engineers and psychologists. Sometimes they were asked to “design an elevator for 1000 floors” or “design an in-flight attendance system.”
It’s really a world that prepares you for what is coming.
The whole time, I’m thinking we are learning about a collaborative design tool, Figma, using a collaborative communication tool, Slack. This is the world we live in, embrace it. 👊
