The Rise of (Figma) AI: Highlights From the Design Conference
This year, I had the opportunity to attend Config in person. What the heck is Config, you may be wondering? It is an annual design conference that Figma, a collaborative web-based design tool, hosts for two days in San Francisco, CA.
People from all over listen to talks from industry pros and learn about any new features the Figma team has worked to launch or will launch soon.
Here are the new Figma features I thought were a pretty big deal:
✨ Find with AI (in beta)
- Pull an image from (e.g., Slack or your desktop) into the file, and it can help locate where the asset is within the file
- Search with description
- Search with a sketch
- Search the entire Figma community
- 📊 Figma Slides (in beta)
- 💡 Suggest Auto Layout
- ⌨️ DEV Mode
- Ready for Dev View only shows items that are ready to build
To dive deeply into the above plus learn more about additional features, check out Figma Learn.
To stay present each day, I opted not to take my laptop and instead had my phone for time checking along with a top spiral-bound notebook and pen for jotting down handwritten snippets from each discussion.
My day one agenda was packed with the opening keynote, two design systems sessions, one design/craft session, and one innovation session, followed by the closing keynote.
During “The Art of Obsession: Crafting a Culture of Excellence,” Jenny Arden of Zillow offered wisdom from her experience serving on design leadership teams and as a veteran design leader known for bringing new, large-scale initiatives to life. From Arden:
AI can get to 80% (good) and humans get to 100% (great) — people remember the output, they don’t remember the budget OR the deadline
During “The Impact of Flash,” Jonathan Gay founder of Freestone Ranch and creator of Flash and had this to say about the success of the multimedia software:
The community of users took Flash to the next level — we were in the right place at the right time, we were persistent, and we wanted to help people succeed
During “The Design Renaissance,” Reginé Gilbert a James Weldon Johnson professor at New York University and expert in user experience design shared what we can do that AI cannot:
1. Emotions & Humor 2. Ethical Judgement 3. Balancing Technology & Creativity — remember to do your own research … we as humans can think differently … and lastly, context matters
Day two opened with a keynote, two design/craft sessions, one design systems session, and another design/craft session before concluding with the final closing keynote.
During the keynote “Leaving Fingerprints: Product, Design & Stories at the Browser Company,” Karla Cole a Product Designer at The Browser Company had this to say about telling stories:
Don’t be afraid to start from your own experience … look outside of tech … tell the story that scares you the most
During “Courage Against Conformity,” Taamrat Amaize Chief Strategy Officer at Collins explained the formula for irresistible future design:
It’s taking the new and combining it with the familiar
In overheard conversations, there was a mix of people voicing concern about AI taking their jobs, while others expressed being reassured and reanimated. My opinion on AI is to use it carefully, in moderation, and with context alongside the many other tools we have all learned to use over the years to stay relevant in our chosen field.
Overall, my experience at Config was incredible. I’m very excited to see where Figma goes with the use of AI in their future updates. Also, I appreciate their transparency in how they hope to use AI while making it extremely easy to opt-out if you don’t want to use any of those features.
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