Watching the keynote, the feature where it spits out a design based on a prompt seems like a gimmick. If it doesn't work with MY design system (as opposed to curated design systems like MUI or Bootstrap or whatever) then it's useless. It's also probably not ready to design complex applications, as opposed to brochure websites and apps that fit into very common templates.
The AI-powered search features seem really promising, as finding the right design file is a problem I face every day. What they showed was the ability to paste a screenshot (e.g. from production) and have it find where that design came from, or use a text search to do the same. That's something that'll make me squeal with joy if it actually works.
Filling in mock data in designs is also a big potential quality of life improvement. The domain I work in is so specific that I'm not sure it'll be of practical use to me, but I'm hopeful.
All in all, I'm glad about the parts where they are trying to target some specific pain points with AI, skeptical about the rest.
> If it doesn't work with MY design system (as opposed to curated design systems like MUI or Bootstrap or whatever) then it's useless
You hit the nail on the head. This our #1 focus for this team moving forward. If you noticed in the keynote, Dylan highlighted Chen Chen and the Google Material team, both of whom created generators for their design systems. They work, but they were hard to make as the tooling to create these isn't polished or ready yet. It's something we're actively thinking about and improving in order to make this useful for those with existing design systems.
The problem here isn’t that it uses your pattern library or not. The issue is it will spit out static designs that look right but aren’t actually based on either user goals or business goals of the product. It’s just a design that looks right. It’s missing the entire workflow design part and in fact covers over the need for it.
I see it leading a lot of less experienced product programs astray.
I think what would also be important is to select an existing frame and create additional views that fit the existing frame, that would definitely help creating a proper workflow
Are you really shooting to generate something full-fidelity? Or rather provide lower fidelity but empower the user to spitball and maybe test light interaction?
And if it is full fidelity, how do you ensure users actually own the copyright at the end of the day?
I do think the number one points I've had with the feature were:
- I'd like to create tablet sized apps, or desktop/web sized apps (and not landing pages)
- It would be awesome if I could provide mock JSON data and let Figma design a rough concept of how to align that data
I think with those two things, It can be a really great "first draft", to be remade by me properly.
> The AI-powered search features seem really promising, as finding the right design file is a problem I face every day. What they showed was the ability to paste a screenshot (e.g. from production) and have it find where that design came from, or use a text search to do the same. That's something that'll make me squeal with joy if it actually works.
I've found that, generally, "better search" is the biggest productivity bump I get from gen AI at the moment. That is, lots of times I don't know the keyword of what I want to find beforehand, and with things like ChatGPT I can just describe it to find out. E.g. recently I needed to update all the values in a Postgres array column of one value to another, so I just described to ChatGPT what I wanted to do. It would have taken me a lot longer to hunt through the docs to find the `array_replace` function and get usage examples.
Plus, in the "better search" use case I'm much less concerned about hallucinations as I'm really only using ChatGPT to get me started in the right direction in the first place.
It’s true. My best example of this recently was describing what I needed to finish a cabling project and discovering that it’s called a “grommet”. I had already spent a bunch of time on the Home Depot website searching for the wrong things (faceplate, outlet cover, etc) without success. Armed with the correct term, I found the product in seconds.
most projects are pretty generic. I've been on countless where they just want something that looks like everything else. If this can deliver that and I can do it without having to contract out a designer, it's a win.
The race is on. What will AI deliver first...? Production-ready code so PMs don't need engineers, or production-ready designs so PMs don't need designers?
The reality is that without domain experts (design, research, engineering, business, law) you're left trusting the AI to make the decision without a good way to check if it made the right one.
Oh you'll find out alright... when it's too late. I'm just waiting for a year or two from now when companies realize what a colossal hole they dug themselves in using a bunch of AI generated crap in production.
> You can tell me about the math, theories and laws but look around you, nobody cares about those any more.
It's true. Just a few years back, design thinking was all the rage. Nowadays, even apps from flagship companies feel all over the place. Attention to detail, unobtrusive interface, intelligent symbols, subdued color palettes, rich illustrations, all that is out the window now. Why should we need good design when we can replace it with cheaper "AI" templates?
v0 by Vercel only outputs one UI library, shadcn/ui. Useful if you are wanting to use that library for example starting a project from scratch. Potentially vercel will add more.
Naming layers has been a problem for decades. There are even memes about it. With the advent of AI, we all knew this is a perfect match where AI can help from day one. Happy to see it arrive to Figma now.
CSS has had a similar issue with naming classes, which is one reason for how TailwindCSS’s design. I wonder if we’ll see more AI tools for these kinds of use cases.
Yeah this one is crazy cool, not even a designer, but my figma prototypes are trash to manager after a while, any approximate name is better than my Layer 1231
Exactly. TBH, I don't understand why there wasn't some auto-naming logic even before AI. Names like "avatar wrapper" or "left column" are not difficult to infer from the layout in many cases. Plus it doesn't need to be anywhere near 100% precise – as you hinted, naming something "layer 1231" is utterly useless anyway.
They have not yet started doing any training on user content and I applaud them for that. (They've only used public community files so far.)
However, they are headed that way to support advanced AI features. Quoting Fimga:
Two important highlights: First, all admins have control of whether their team’s content data is used for training. Second, participation in AI content training is not required to use Figma or Figma’s AI features. Learn more about our approach to training.
PLEASE, PLEASE make that opt-in versus opt-out. Do the right thing here, Figma!
Higher plans actually can’t opt in. If I look in settings on my organization plan I cannot turn on the allow training checkbox - it’s disabled in an off state.
What happened to MS Office and copilot integration?
They gave impressive demos[1] showing users create high-quality PowerPoint with good design and content just by prompting a few sentences more than one year ago.
I don't have Copilot license so I don't use it by myself.
If someone uses it daily, how good is it?
It looks like a solid set of updates. A lot of designers seem worried, but I’m not sure they need to be. It was always the case you could get prebuilt templates and the like, but companies still prefer to have professional designers. I imagine it’ll make prototyping much faster
Not everything listed here, but things like layer naming assists, translation, and mockup auto-fill definitely help designers focus on what's important to the user.
More time spent on user issues rather than monotonous work sounds like a win win.
Is it just me or did gen AI allow companies to cheat a lot more with their demos/showcases? I feel like there’s absolutely no way to tell if what’s shown is representative, cherry-picked or outright faked. I mean, it’s non-reproducible by nature, so it even gives plausible deniability to unscrupulous marketing departments.
I’d rather watch a YouTuber or streamer do a real project in a tool too see if and how it works in practice.
If you watched the keynote, it was pretty clearly not cherry-picked or faked. It didn't come up with perfect images or text every time. It felt very much like what happens when you enter a prompt into a chat-based AI.
As additional proof that it was not faked, the CEO was clearly distracted by the notifications from hundreds of people requesting access to the live file he was demoing from, which was a pretty good live demo moment.
I don't think it's that big of a change. I've sat on both sides of many meetings where designers showcased mockups of functionality that didn't exist and wasn't even sanity-checked for a possibility to be engineered in the first place.
Late to this conversation, but I'm a designer and very excited about these new AI features. They address tedious work that most designers don't want to deal with. It reminds me of why Figma won love from the design community in the first place - because they innovate on systems using emerging technology. They have always made designers more effective and relevant, rather than maintaining status quo simply because enterprise paying customers are stuck in their ways.
Despite the ethical concerns, it would be very useful if Figma offered an option for large organisations to train an organisation-level model that does not share data with the rest of the world. I believe the opt-in rate would be much higher.
A company Adobe tried to buy $20 billion, because they killed off Fireworks (since they didn't understand its purpose - which gave rise to Sketch) and tried to copy Sketch with XD but failed even when they made it for free (and you know that was only temporary as they hoped it would become more popular).
Every AI tool being released by 3rd parties is being blacklisted by my company. The primary reasoning is around sharing data with tool itself. On the other hand, if my clients allow them, there’s a long review and approval process followed by continuous audits.
Is anyone else running into this at their companies? I look at these tools and get excited but I’m continuously being blocked from using for work.
My very large corporation is 100% all in on Figma, but has recently blocked several tools and have signaled (through meetings and memo's) that their AI tools will also be blocked.
As an aside, I work in accessibility and our team started using some AI and automated tools to do some A11Y testing and much of the functionality has been blocked. We were really interested in the companies mobile testing tool but now we won't be able to use that because of the network restrictions.
I've also heard complaints from Devs who said GitHub Copilot has also been blocked and they've been in discussions with the security team to try and get approved, but no luck thus far, they're not budging on allowing it yet.
So you're right, its not just one app or tool, companies are staring to block this stuff wholesale across their orgs.
> I've also heard complaints from Devs who said GitHub Copilot has also been blocked
I am soooo glad that I do not work for a very large corporation anymore. Man, the hurdles they create are a massive pain in the rear.
I work for a small 10-person company. I get to make the rules. And we are never hard ass about the rules. I don't think I have been this productive at any job in the past.
I understand that a 100,000 person company has different set of concerns. But I do think that an average developer at smaller company is more productive because they have to deal with a lot less BS.
I don't get this. Obviously Figma already stored all your designs in their cloud. What's the additional problem with also getting AI suggestions back from Figma?
The problem is when other people are getting 'AI suggestions' based on your work. What if you don't own the copyright for the work you're producing (it's for a client)? What if you don't what AI being trained on your data?
> Two important highlights: First, all admins have control of whether their team’s content data is used for training. Second, participation in AI content training is not required to use Figma or Figma’s AI features. Learn more about our approach to training.
Blanket bans on third party AI tools don't make any sense to me. As the parent commenter said, they already have all your data, so you already have to trust them with that. Why would you trust them in those other areas but not trust their explicit statements that say that you can disable training on your data?
I agree with this, I think I was just interpreting "ban" differently. I.e. if the default is you can't use it, but then there is a specific request/review/audit process to allow it (as original GP's comment said), that makes sense. I just don't think it makes sense to ban without an exception process.
The language in the announcement looks tricky (albeit I didn't get into the legal document). It says NEW content won't be used for training. Also, it's going to be on for a moment. You have to go out of your way to turn it off. They could claim they copied your info in the hour or so before you got around to it.
Another commenter mentioned that the default is no training for Enterprise and Organization accounts, but for Starter and Professional accounts the default allows training and you need to explicitly opt out.
If Figma takes a little inspiration from Adobe (they were almost acquired at one point after all) they'll realize they can change their TOS at any time for any reason with impunity. Such statements are at best dubious and at worst complete unprovable bullshit.
The only way to be sure your data stays yours is local models running on your machines.
This applies to all non self hosted software and even much self hosted software that radios out invasive telemetry. The difference between offering an AI feature or not offering it is time, but collecting your data as training for that eventually inevitable AI feature is happening now, everywhere, all the time. The only defense is retreat into a SKIF or depend on ToS, and as you point out ToS is a very weak defense. Things are moving considerably faster than law, regulation, judicial review, and establishment of a compliance framework can possibly accommodate.
Welcome to the future you were promised! It’s already too late.
My organization is kind of just not talking about AI tools and the obvious risks. We've gotten neither a ban nor an all-clear, leaving us to use it according to our own judgment and not talk about it very much. I think more companies are in this boat, and while I understand your frustration, your company is making the wiser move (although it may bite them; some of the more reckless companies will die for their carelessness but others will survive and pull ahead faster).
What you have to do, to get around this is to negotiate a contract with the company providing the AI tools, which explicitly forbids them from doing that.
This is how corporations solve these kinds of issues. As soon as you as a company are a customer instead of some random person using their AI tools, you start to actually have influence over the other company.
As mentioned elsewhere, you don't need some special contract. Figma allows anyone to opt out of training (though I think it's a fair point that only Enterprise and Organization plans are opted out by default, while Starter and Professional plans you have to explicitly select opt out).
Nearly every SaaS tool I've seen that has AI features lets you opt out of training, as these SaaS companies know that this is a deal breaker for many of their clients.
Which I think is also unsurprising, it takes the insanity of Adobe to want to claim your customers work for you.
But this is exactly the type of situation why you have a contract. Even if it is standard, this is the means by which you can enforce the AI company to not use your data.
Yep lots of companies are (rightfully) being careful about 3rd party AI tools. You're sending valuable company assets or in some cases even PII (though probably not for Figma) to another party and you're basically hoping they aren't being careless.
If Figma is using OpenAI API on the back-end for this, does the data they relay to OpenAI get protected? (Not sure if they do, but curious if their solution is on-prem or being handled by a 3rd party)
I saw this in a few of my friends' companies. I have asked to everyone how is storing data in Azure is better than using Azure ChatGPT API, and till now I haven't been able to get a good answer.
Still, it makes sense, as if your company is serious about data protection in the first place, it isn't just "using Azure", but has a contract with guarantees. Guarantees that don't carry over to randos using Azure just because it's Azure.
This. If you don't trust your provider when it says it won't use data you embed in your LLM API Calls, why do you trust them when you use any of their other services?
Because those other services are built with clear expectations of tenant isolation, and cross-tenant data leakage would be a near-fatal event.
But the models behind these AI tools have a single-tenant core, with tenant isolation added on as a heroic effort to fake what the technology does not support by default.
Why don't you just scroll past it? On any given day, 90% of the stuff on the front page isn't interesting to me, but it's easy to just ignore them. Or use Adblock to filter them out with a custom rule.
Figma is a tool used (and loved) by many of us in the web or frontend world, both because of its utility and because it's the "Google Docs" of today, meaning software that uses cutting-edge web technologies to deliver a good app experience that previously required desktop installs (Sketch, Photoshop, etc.)
Plus, they narrowly avoided being bought out by Adobe (thank god), which would've saddened a lot of us. Figma was very much loved; Adobe was usually not.
All in all it's just an important tool and interesting company to keep tabs on.
It's an everyday affair, every single day there are several promoted Figma stories on the front page. It's not really that revolutionairy either, other than the model of putting it behind the cloud instead of letting people own the product on their computer.
Is that really true? Looking at stories in the past year (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...), it seems like we easily go weeks between high-scoring Figma stories. And that's for a widely-used tool that's critical to many of our teams on an everyday basis, vs say the stories about the latest ephemeral crypto or AI company hype.
Would you feel the same way about stories about popular IDEs or programming languages, for example? Figma is THAT important for some of us, and I appreciate reading about it here.
> It's not really that revolutionairy either, other than the model of putting it behind the cloud instead of letting people own the product on their computer.
I mean, sure, but that's also in and of itself pretty important. That's how they were able to so quickly displace Sketch and Photoshop and Adobe XD.
It IS pretty revolutionary to be able to code a heavy, powerful, performant app like that in the browser, the same way it was when Google Docs first came out and people were like "what, you can run microsoft word in the browser?" What previously would've required a lengthy CD-ROM install (or hundreds of megabytes of downloads and patches) can now load in a few seconds in a browser window, with multiple users and editors all collaborating at the same time, including managers with no graphics software training.
That's pretty amazing -- not just according to me, but the millions who use it. In contrast to so much on HN, Figma actually offers a real product used daily by millions of users. They didn't do that by offering something nobody wanted. It's an exceptionally good product built to high UI standards, performing well on bog-standard browsers across a variety of machines. That's no easy feat. As a frontend dev, I really appreciate the effort and thoughtfulness they've put into it.
That's just me. It's fine if that's not interesting to you, but again, just scroll past it...?
Figma is often frontpage because it's one of the most-used tools on the market for tech companies, and it's therefore relevant to a lot of the people here.
The AI-powered search features seem really promising, as finding the right design file is a problem I face every day. What they showed was the ability to paste a screenshot (e.g. from production) and have it find where that design came from, or use a text search to do the same. That's something that'll make me squeal with joy if it actually works.
Filling in mock data in designs is also a big potential quality of life improvement. The domain I work in is so specific that I'm not sure it'll be of practical use to me, but I'm hopeful.
All in all, I'm glad about the parts where they are trying to target some specific pain points with AI, skeptical about the rest.