The exciting buzz of innovation lingered in the air after several members of our design team had the privilege of attending Figma’s Config Conference in San Francisco, where Figma unveiled a dramatic expansion of its product suite. It’s unified its ecosystem of products with the goal of creating a full-stack creation environment with the help of AI.
We also attended world-class presentations covering a range of topics in product strategy, design, and development, with an overarching theme focused on closing the gap between design and production. Throughout the event, we couldn’t help but wonder how these new capabilities and trends could enable us to deliver faster, higher-quality design solutions for our clients.
Key Highlights
What we found was that Figma essentially doubled its tool offerings. This expansion continues the trend of evolving Figma’s role in the product space from a design tool to an end-to-end creation platform that boosts operations for intelligent transformation partners like us. Here’s how Figma’s solutions make a major impact on web publishing and more:
- Figma Make transforms designs into code through natural language.
- Figma Sites enables direct web publishing with responsive layouts.
- Figma Draw introduces advanced illustration capabilities.
- Figma Buzz creates a dedicated space for brand asset management.
- Grid reimagines responsive layouts.
Figma highlighted its powerful approach to AI integration, focusing on how it can enhance our craft rather than replace human design skills. These new products and features all work together to eliminate handoffs between design and production while maintaining design fidelity across the entire product development lifecycle. We also took note of how the conference sessions emphasized breaking down the boundary between design and production.
Bridging Design and Production
Figma Make’s prompt-to-code capability represents a significant jump in design workflow by enhancing human creativity, not replacing it. Rather than generating production-ready code (which would eliminate valuable creative friction), Figma Make serves as a creative partner and collaborator. It’s like having a front-end developer working alongside you in real time.
As designers craft in Figma Design, they can instantly transform static mockups into interactive experiences within minutes, creating a rapid feedback loop of ideation, visualization, and refinement. This balanced approach helps designers maintain creativity and intentionality while accelerating the prototype-to-feedback loop. The result is a workflow where designers are no longer hindered by technical barriers and can instead craft meaningful human experiences.
This means we can help our clients interact with their product in a more realistic context much earlier in the process. Our ability to create high-fidelity, interactive prototypes quickly allows us to have better conversations with clients and elicit more meaningful and accurate feedback. In turn, this leads to more effective user testing before significant investment is made and fewer costly revisions later in development. The result? Better-aligned expectations and confident decision-making.
Transforming Design Systems
Design systems and component libraries are central to our work for our clientele. Organizations increasingly seek comprehensive systems that create consistency across touchpoints while reducing design and development time. Figma has long enabled designers to collaborate, organize, and share components, with Developer Mode recently improving design-to-development handoffs.
However, design systems traditionally struggle with the “last mile” problem: ensuring documented components are implemented correctly across products. Figma Make, along with other tools like Locofy, can help bridge this gap by automatically translating design system components into code. This capability allows designers to stress-test components across multiple frameworks and use cases, identifying edge cases earlier and ensuring more robust implementations.
For our clients, the integration of AI-enabled solutions like iX Hello and Figma Make transform design systems from static visuals into dynamic, business-critical assets. The evolution of these design solutions deliver several tangible benefits: reduced implementation costs, faster time-to-market, and enhanced brand consistency. These tools continue to assist design system teams with their complicated site ecosystems in the following ways:
- Identify gaps in existing systems by assisting in the auditing process.
- Accelerate component documentation.
- Sync across different teams with all aspects of the system.
This AI-enabled approach ensures that our clients can maintain design consistency at scale while accelerating their digital product goals.
Reimagining Design Solutions
To work with agility, we need teams that own a specific problem space from end to end. This allows us to build deeper expertise and operate more efficiently without repeating the costly and time-consuming onboarding process at the start of every new project.
It also creates space for specialization. Take the design system example from earlier: a Figma component library alone has limited value. A mature design system requires a dedicated team made up of players such as account managers, systems advocates, designers, and developers.
These team members can then partner with enterprise clients to identify opportunities, set up structure, support adoption and governance, and ensure long-term scalability. That’s where the real value resides— enabling clients to rapidly, yet consistently build stellar content. We can also nurture our creativity by turning to our greatest resource: each other.
Instead of working in isolation, we can foster a culture of sharing works in progress. This helps us think through challenges collaboratively. We can also treat our internal and client teams as a testing ground, designing for ourselves, building internal tools, and solving real, day-to-day problems.
Keeping Humans at the Forefront
If we can evolve how we work, collaborate, and organize while keeping empathy and quality at the heart of it, we’re optimistic that Figma’s design solutions will enable us to help shape the age of AI in a way that remains deeply human.
Learn more about what we can do as your intelligent transformation partner.
