Speaker describes Figma’s 'Make Designs' feature shipped at Config 2024 as the company’s first prompt-to-design tool that generates native Figma frames (not code-backed prototypes). They reflect that the feature targeted a real designer pain—bridging to the code layer—yet unintentionally appeared to automate designers’ taste and expertise; this messaging and positioning produced key learnings about presenting new AI-powered design capabilities.
Chapters
We shipped stuff last year at config 2024 we shipped a feature called Make Designs, which was our very first attempt at a prompt to design products inside of Figma Design. And so you could say make me a landing page for XYZ and you would create it not as a code backed prototype, but as native Figma frames. And so I think it was definitely a big learning in like how we talk about these things and what they're for. And I think with make, what we did right was we started with things that designers trouble with, which is getting into the code layer. And so we sort of start at the end of the process where a lot of people do get stuck today with the current set of tools. It felt like something net new as opposed to automating parts of the process that I have a lot of opinions, expertise, taste around, which was not our original intention, but you know, easy to be missed, to come across wrong. And so I think that was definitely a big learning for us in general. As a company that prides itself on being advocates for design as a function and champions of designers is like making it really, really clear that this is kind of trying to new superpowers.
