In this commentary, the speaker argues that Figma’s 2025 Config announcements—four new products (Figma Make, Sites, Draw, Buzz) that double its portfolio to eight tools—signal a strategic shift to a unified, AI‑augmented design ecosystem that competes with Adobe, Webflow, Framer, Canva, and AI‑coding platforms. By integrating UI/UX design, illustration, website building, no‑code prototyping, and brand asset creation, Figma is urging designers to abandon narrow specializations and become well‑rounded generalists who can research, design, prototype, hand off to developers, and collaborate across disciplines within a single collaborative environment. The speaker praises the convenience and potential efficiency gains but raises several concerns: the risk of rushed product quality, the possibility of Figma evolving into a monopoly akin to Adobe, pricing pressures on designers in emerging economies, and the impact of a likely IPO on the market. The video concludes with a call to action for designers to adapt their skill sets and an invitation to join the speaker’s newsletter.
Chapters
Figma has sent a strong message to every type of designer out there. It doesn't matter if you're a product designer, UI designer, UX designer, web designer, or brand designer. As long as you design a digital product or service or marketing material, Figma has a message for you. And I need to deliver that message because I think we are all caught up in the hype of Figma's 2025 config while the real message may be flying over everyone's heads. So just think about this. Figma has gone from competing with just Adobe XD, the UI design tool that is owned by Adobe, to almost being acquired by Adobe, to now competing with Framer, Webflow, Lovable, V0, Canva, Google Slides, and practically the entire Adobe suite, excluding the video editing tools. Now, here's the context behind this message that I believe that Figma is sending. You probably know that Figma recently launched 4 new products and 22 new features at Config, their annual design conference. This brings their total products to 8. Before the announcement, Figma already had 4 products. That's FigJam, Dev Mode, Figma Slide, and the original Figma Design. Now they've added Figma Make, Figma Sites, Figma Draw, and Figma Buzz. That's a lot of Figmas. These new products expand Figma capabilities across every design discipline. And let me walk you through them. Figma Sites lets designers create websites in Figma and publish them to live websites. This makes Figma a direct competitor to powerful website builders like Framer and Webflow. Figma Make introduces vibe coding into Figma. It means you can write a prompt to generate functional prototypes powered by AI without writing a single line of code, literally just coding on vibes. This puts Figma in competition with other AI coding tools like Lovable, V0, both.neon, and some of the other ones. This means you don't need coding skills to bring your design ideas to life anymore. Figma Draw brings vector illustration capabilities into Figma. It's like Adobe Illustrator for the web, but even more powerful because it's actually collaborative. With Figma Draw, designers can now create complex vector illustrations on an infinite canvas right inside Figma. And that's not all. There's one more product. Figma Buzz enables brand and marketing designers to create brand assets for marketing campaigns and maintain consistent brand identity, making Figma a direct competitor to Canva. Every product Figma has launched fits nicely within the design ecosystem that they are building. And they have more data on designers' workflow than any other design tool. Maybe only Adobe has more data about designers than Figma does, but Figma knows what designers are coming into the tool to do. And designers have been hacking their way around Figma to do things that it wasn't really designed for. And Figma knows that this is happening. For example, designers were already creating slides in Figma years before Figma Slides was built. And we've been hacking our way around creating illustrations in Figma for years too. I create the thumbnails for my YouTube videos in Figma, even though I pay £56 monthly to Adobe for their entire creative suite. But it's just so much easier for me to create these thumbnails and iterate them in Figma. Looking at all these 8 products, Figma is bringing every design discipline into their ecosystem and designing workflows to match how designers and non-designers actually work together regardless of their specialties. Product designers and user researchers can use Figma Design and FigJam for UI design and brainstorming. Product designers can now create realistic prototypes with Figma Make without coding. Developers can use Dev Mode for implementation. Everyone, including PMs, can use Figma Slides for presentations. Brand and marketing designers can use Figma Boards for brand assets. Illustrators can use Figma Draw for illustrations. And everyone, I mean everyone collaborates in one tool. You don't need to download and install multiple softwares and update them every 2 weeks like you would normally do with Adobe. Everybody collaborates in one place, and that's the real game changer here. Think about it. Why is Figma enabling designers to do everything from UI design to illustrations to live websites to real working prototypes with AI? What happens when one tool can handle tasks that used to need 5 different tools? This is a sign of a major shift in how design work could happen in the near future and who gets to do that work. The message Figma is sending is clear. The time to be a generalist designer is right now. Throw your fancy design titles in the trash and start building your skills to become a well-rounded designer who can identify the right problems through great research, design great visually appealing solutions, build working versions using tools like Figma Make, work with engineers in dev mode to polish your ideas, and collaborate with brand and marketing designers to ensure that your design connects with users. Yeah, it sounds like a lot to do, but it feels like this is where the future is going to. It's self-limiting to describe yourself as a specialist focused on only UX or UI or any other specialist title that you identify as. Especially if you're just starting your design career. The designers who have the luxury of specializing are senior individual contributors with years of experience, and even the most in-demand seniors right now are specialized generalists. And what do I mean by that? They are well-rounded in skills, making them generalists, but specialists in specific domains. A senior IC, for example, might have extensive experience designing security features for banking and fintech, making them a specialist in that area. But they can also identify problems through user research, solve those problems with really good taste and design, and collaborate with engineers, marketing, and other stakeholders to ship solutions and also monitor the feedback. That makes them a generalist. Figma is consolidating every design discipline into one tool because AI is empowering designers to do so much more. And what this means is that design and product teams will shrink. One designer will do the job of 2 or more designers and Only the generalists will thrive in this new world. But I have some concerns about Figma's approach. First, it seems like Figma is rushing. Like this, this is likely the most product that they've launched at once. And these aren't just simple features. They're competing with billion-dollar industry. If we combine the 4 new products that was recently launched, they're taking on a $220 billion creative and AI coding industry, including Adobe and Canva. And that's huge. My concern is that Figma might struggle to maintain the quality of their original products that made them successful in the first place. Truly understanding the workflow of designers and creating beautifully designed, nearly perfect tools that fit like a glove is why Figma gained such wide adoption in the first place, and I worry that they might lose that edge. My second concern is that Figma might become another Adobe. Adobe went from being the most loved tools for creatives in the mid-2000s to mid-2010s to becoming the Thanos of the creative industry in recent years because of their monopoly and questionable pricing strategies, and I worry that Figma is headed down the same path. Even before launching these 4 new products, Figma was getting criticism for their pricing on their developer seats in Dev Mode and the constant price increases across different tiers, not to mention how much they've reduced the value of their free tier. All these new products will definitely come at a cost. I mean, the company needs to keep making profit, but with the average designer or design team in emerging economies and developing countries like Nigeria, India, or the Philippines, where a dollar means so much more and can go so much further, be able to afford Figma and enjoy this new product? I don't think so. And that worries me because talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not. Many talented designers in developing countries have built their design careers and gotten discovered thanks to Figma's friendly pricing when they started. Personally, I benefited from being an early Figma user. It's a major tool that has shaped my career Till today, and I'm concerned that this won't be the case for new talents that are coming from this region. There are rumors that Figma may be filing for an IPO soon, joining companies like Adobe and Canva as publicly traded design companies. These product launches definitely add to the value of of the IPO if those rumors are true. But but my question is: Are we witnessing another monopoly in the design industry? And if so, who's building the new Figma to disrupt? The industry like Figma did years ago. Every 2 weeks on Monday, I share personal stories and experiences from my product design journey to help my 3,000+ readers stay ahead in this fiercely competitive industry. If you'd like to join my newsletter community, follow the link in the description, and I'll see you in the next video.
