Figma
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Figma’s Community lets designers share and remix live files
As designers grow both in sheer numbers and within the hierarchy of organizations, design tool makers are adapting to their evolving needs in different ways. Figma, the web-based collaborative design tool, is taking a note from the engineering revolution of the early aughts.
“What if there were a GitHub for designers?” mused Dylan Field, early on in the lifecycle of Figma as a company. Today, that vision is brought to life with the launch of Figma Community. (Figma Community is launching in a closed beta for now.)
In a crowded space, with competitors like Adobe, InVision, Sketch and more, Figma differentiates itself on its web-based multiplayer approach. Figma is a design tool that works like Google Docs, with multiple designers in the same file, working alongside one another without disrupting each other.
But that’s just the base level of the overall collaboration that Figma believes designers crave. Field told us that he sees a clear desire from designers to not only share their work, whether it’s on a portfolio webpage or on social media, as well as a desire to learn from the work of other designers.
And yet, when a creative shares a design on social media, it’s just a static image. Other designers can’t see how it went from a blank page to an interesting design, and are left to merely appreciate it without learning anything new.
With Figma Community, designers and even organizations can share live design files that others can inspect, remix and learn from.
Individual designers can set up their own public-facing profile page to show off their designs, as well as intra-organization profile pages so other team members within their organization can learn from each other. On the other hand, organizations can publicly share their design systems and philosophy on their own page.
For example, the city of Chicago has set up a profile on Figma Community for other designers to follow the city’s design system in their own materials.
As far as remixing design files goes, Figma is using a CC4 license, which allows for a remix but forces attribution. That said, Field says the company is using this closed beta period to learn more about what the community wants around different license types.
Community is free and is not meant to drive revenue for the company, but rather offer further value to designers using the platform.
“It’s early,” said Dylan Field. “This is just the scaffolding of what’s to come. It’s the start of a lot of work that we’re going to be doing in the area of collaboration and community.”
Figma has raised a total of $83 million from investors like Index, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins and Grelock, according to Crunchbase.
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Cloud-based design tool Figma launches plug-ins
Figma, the startup looking to put design tools in the cloud, has today announced new plug-ins for the platform that will help users clean up their workflows.
Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field says that plug-ins have been the most requested feature from users since the company’s launch. So, for the last year, the team has been working to build plug-in functionality on the back of Figma’s API (launched in March 2018) with three main priorities: stability, speed and security.
The company has been testing plug-ins in beta for a while now, with 40 plug-ins approved at launch today.
Here are some of the standouts from launch today:
On the utility side, Rename It is a plug-in that allows designers to automatically rename and organize their layers as they work. Content Buddy, on the other hand, gives users the ability to add placeholder text (for things like phone numbers, names, etc.) that they can automatically find and replace later. Stark and ColorBlind are both accessibility plug-ins that help designers make sure their work meets the WCAG 2.0 contrast accessibility guidelines, and actually see their designs through the lens of eight different types of color vision deficiencies, respectively.
Other plug-ins allow for adding animation (Figmotion), changing themes (Themer), adding a map to a design (Map Maker) and more.
Anyone can create plug-ins for public use on the Figma platform, but folks can also make private plug-ins for enterprise use, as well. For example, a Microsoft employee built a plug-in that automatically changes the theme of the design based on the various Microsoft products, such as Word, Outlook, etc.
Field says that the company currently has no plans to monetize plug-ins. Rather, the addition of plug-ins to the platform is a move based on customer happiness and satisfaction. Moreover, Figma’s home on the web allows for the product to evolve more rapidly and in tune with customers. Rather than having to build each individual feature on its own, Figma can now open up the platform to its power users to build what they’d like into the web app.
Figma has raised a total of nearly $83 million since launch, according to Crunchbase. As of the company’s latest funding round ($40 million led by Sequoia six months ago), Figma was valued at $440 million post-funding.
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Sketch, maker of popular design tools, just landed $20 million in Series A funding from Benchmark in its first outside round
You’ve probably noticed: Design has become central for many businesses that might have once considered it an afterthought. Indeed, with sales and marketing so thoroughly optimized at this point — and companies wondering how else to trounce the competition — there’s now a race afoot for numerous startups looking to become the Salesforce of design.
InVision is one of them. Just three months ago, the design collaboration startup raised $115 million in Series F funding at a $1.9 billion valuation. More recently, Figma, another design player, sealed up $40 million in Series C funding in a round that brings its total funding to $82.9 million and a valuation of $440 million.
Still, if the venture firm Benchmark has its way, Sketch — a seven-year-old, 42-person, Europe-based company — is going to win this race. Truth be told, Benchmark jumped at the chance to back Sketch founders Emanuel Sá and Pieter Omvlee when they reached out to the firm, says Chetan Puttagunta, the newest general partner at Benchmark. “We’d definitely known of Sketch and once we got a look at the company, we were blown away by it. There’s so much potential of what this could be that things moved fast. There wasn’t much of a negotiation. We were like, ‘What do you guys want to do? Let’s do it.’ ”
It helps that Sketch — which has a completely distributed workforce, with designers and other employees based around Europe and the U.S. — has been profitable from the outset, and that one million people have already paid $99 for a perpetual license (with one year of free updates).
Also impressive: those sales are entirely organic, and they are directly from Sketch’s site. Though its design tools were formerly available in the Mac App Store — Apple once gave it a design award and it routinely topped the Mac App Store charts — Sketch parted ways with the company back in 2015, including owing to Apple’s guidelines about what a Mac app can and can’t do, and the time Apple takes to approve app updates, among other things.
Benchmark — which isn’t sharing Sketch’s post-money valuation or how much of the company that $20 million is buying the venture firm — also sees a future wherein Sketch moves beyond its roots as a prototyping tool for both highly experienced and novice designers to build out their experience without the help of coders. The idea is for it to become a tool that teams big and small can gather around. In other words, like InVision and Figma (and Adobe and Autodesk), Sketch is going after the enterprise now, too.
In fact, Sketch is already planning some big upgrades that will be available this summer, as Sá and Omvlee told us yesterday from their respective offices in Portugal and The Netherlands. One major offering around the corner that builds on its existing cloud offering is team collaboration, via a tool called Sketch for Teams. As the two tell us, Sketch wants to be where all documents live and it will allow teams to make annotations and comments in the app.
Sketch is also bringing its tools to the browser starting later this year so users can render an entire document, add developer hand-off and allow editing along with collaboration, all without the need to leave the browser.
All of these features will be made available to anyone who downloads Sketch. In other words, then, as now, everyone gets the same functionality. Asked if there may eventually be features for enterprises that are not available to Sketch’s loyal base of current customers, Puttagunta says it’s a possibility, but that “at the moment, there’s no plan to bifurcate anything. Different modules, different charges — that’s all speculation at this point.”
Sá and Omvlee echo the point, telling us candidly that much remains to be seen. “We need to define a strategy,” says Sá. “So far, we’ve been focused on developing the product, but when the time comes, we’ll discuss [more of these business particulars] with Benchmark and the rest of the team and come up with the best solution.”
What won’t change, says Omvlee, is its focus on creating a product that users love so much that they tell others about it. “Our focus all along has been on making design available to pretty much anyone out there, and then get out of the way.”
Pictured above, left to right: Sketch founders Emanuel Sá and Pieter Omvlee.
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Figma’s design and prototyping tool gets new enterprise collaboration features
Figma, the design and prototyping tool that aims to offer a web-based alternative to similar tools from the likes of Adobe, is launching a few new features today that will make the service easier to use to collaborate across teams in large organizations. Figma Organization, as the company calls this new feature set, is the company’s first enterprise-grade service that features the kind of controls and security tools that large companies expect. To develop and test these tools, the company partnered with companies like Rakuten, Square, Volvo and Uber, and introduced features like unified billing and audit reports for the admins and shared fonts, browsable teams and organization-wide design systems for the designers.
For designers, one of the most important new features here is probably organization-wide design systems. Figma already had tools to create design systems, of course, but this enterprise version now makes it easier for teams to share libraries and fonts with each other to ensure that the same styles are applied to products and services across a company.
Businesses can now also create as many teams as they would like and admins will get more controls over how files are shared and with whom they can be shared. That doesn’t seem like an especially interesting feature, but because many larger organizations work with customers outside of the company, it’s something that will make Figma more interesting to these large companies.
After working with Figma on these new tools, Uber, for example, moved all of its company over to the service and 90 percent of its product design work now happens on the platform. “We needed a way to get people in the right place at the right time — in the right team with the right assets,” said Jeff Jura, staff product designer who focuses on Uber’s design systems. “Figma does that.”
Other new enterprise features that matter in this context are single sign-on support, activity logs for tracking activities across users, teams, projects and files, and draft ownership to ensure that all the files that have been created in an organization can be recovered after an employee leaves the company.
Figma still offers free and professional tiers (at $12/editor/month). Unsurprisingly, the new Organization tier is a bit more expensive and will cost $45/editor/month.
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23-Year-Old’s Design Collaboration Tool Figma Launches With $14M To Fight Adobe
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