Figma - Config 2025: Expressive design and illustration in Figma Draw
Figma Draw is a new initiative aimed at expanding the capabilities of Figma as a design tool, particularly for product designers who need more expressive and efficient tools. The team behind Figma Draw focused on improving vector editing, introducing features like text on a path, shape builder tools, and progressive blur. They also addressed long-standing issues with vector editing, such as boolean operations and stroke outlining, by rewriting the underlying system. The goal was to make Figma a more joyful and efficient tool for designers who work across various design disciplines, from mobile apps to websites and illustrations.
The team emphasized the importance of balancing efficiency with expression, ensuring that new features not only allow for creative freedom but also streamline the design process. They introduced tools like the lasso tool for easier selection, pattern fills for creative designs, and dynamic strokes for more organic shapes. The updates also include improvements to the properties panel, allowing designers to choose fills, strokes, and effects with greater ease and intention. These enhancements aim to make Figma a more comprehensive tool for designers, enabling them to stay in their creative flow without switching between different software.
Key Points:
- Figma Draw enhances vector editing with tools like text on a path and shape builder, improving design efficiency.
- The initiative addresses long-standing vector editing issues, making operations like boolean functions more reliable.
- New expressive tools, such as dynamic strokes and pattern fills, allow for more creative freedom in design.
- The properties panel has been updated for easier access to fills, strokes, and effects, streamlining the design process.
- Figma Draw aims to be a comprehensive tool for various design disciplines, keeping designers in their creative flow.
Details:
1. 🎉 Meet the Figma Draw Team
- The introduction provides an overview of the Figma Draw Team, highlighting the purpose and goals of the team.
- Each team member is introduced with a brief description of their role and contributions to the project.
- The segment emphasizes the collaborative environment and the innovative approaches the team uses to enhance Figma's features.
- Specific examples of the team's achievements or contributions, such as successful projects or metrics, would enhance understanding and provide more actionable insights.
- The introduction sets the stage for understanding the team's structure and the impact of their work on Figma's product development.
2. 🚀 The Vision Behind Figma Draw
- Lauren, an engineer and product manager, Tim, a software designer, and Rajie, a designer advocate and designer, form the core team behind Figma Draw.
- The presentation focuses on sharing the development story, highlighting new features, and improvements in vector editing.
- Lauren demonstrates significant updates made to vector editing, showcasing enhanced capabilities.
- Tim illustrates the application of these new features in icon and UI design, emphasizing practical usage.
- Rajie covers techniques for illustration and effects, offering practical examples to enhance user creativity.
- The presentation builds on insights from a previous keynote, suggesting a continuation and expansion of earlier discussions.
3. 🔍 Expanding Design Possibilities
3.1. Introduction to New Features
3.2. Understanding the Core Audience
4. 🎨 Addressing Diverse User Needs
- Figma aims to be a comprehensive platform where users can maintain workflow seamlessly.
- The community provides feedback about desired features, such as text on a path and a shape builder tool.
- Figma aspires to be a versatile tool accommodating various user needs, striving for a 'utopian society' of design tools.
- Figma has responded to user feedback by implementing features like text on a path, which allows designers to create more dynamic typography.
- The shape builder tool is another example of a feature developed in response to community requests, enabling users to create complex shapes more efficiently.
5. 🛠️ Feature Development and Community Input
- Figma's annual Maker Week empowers employees to pursue innovative projects without requiring leadership approval, fostering creativity and aligning with community interests.
- Significant projects from Maker Week include Text on a Path, Shape Builder, and Rotation Origin, demonstrating direct alignment with user needs.
- Progressive Blur and a variable width stroke project highlight engineering advancements, showcasing the technical achievements and potential integrations into Figma's platform.
6. 🔧 Enhancing Vector Editing
- Figma identified the need to update vector editing features, untouched since the platform's inception, to enhance functionality and user engagement.
- The initiative aimed to incorporate elements of visual delight, similar to successful design products like Mailchimp and Notion.
- A specialized team of five, passionate about vector editing and with relevant project experience, was formed to lead the enhancement efforts.
- The team focused on balancing powerful yet easy-to-use tools with new expressive features, addressing existing usability issues.
- Innovative features introduced include customizable vector paths and enhanced precision tools, improving design flexibility and accuracy.
- User feedback was integral to the development process, ensuring that updates met real-world design needs.
7. 🚀 Introducing New Expressive Tools
- Figma's boolean operations, outline stroke, and SVG exports were revamped to fix long-standing issues, enhancing reliability and performance.
- Fixed bugs such as non-updating mirroring in vector edit mode and improved delete and heal functionalities, thanks to contributions from Annie and Sam.
- Streamlined vector editing by reducing clicks needed for common operations, like boolean operations and stroke adjustments.
- Enabled editing multiple vectors simultaneously, improving user efficiency by removing the need to click in and out of individual vector layers.
- Introduced tools aimed at making vector editing more expressive, allowing for creativity without sacrificing efficiency.
- New tools include enhanced path editing features, making it easier to create complex shapes and designs.
- Expressive features such as customizable vector styles were added, providing designers with more creative freedom.
- Performance improvements reduced lag in rendering complex vector illustrations, ensuring a smoother design experience.
8. 📊 Balancing Efficiency and Expression
- The team analyzed the gap between user creations and Figma's capabilities, identifying needs like grainy gradients and rough shapes to enhance creative expression.
- They evaluated popular designs to ensure new features could replicate these works, balancing innovation with addressing existing issues.
- A list of ideas was developed to enhance efficiency and creativity, aiming to increase user satisfaction through practical feature enhancements.
- New tools were integrated into Figma's design process, rigorously tested, and iterated upon, ensuring they met designers' practical needs and enhanced user experience.
9. 🔧 Demos: Practical Applications
- Visual layer thumbnails and vector tools like boolean groups are introduced to enhance designers' accessibility, enabling more intuitive and efficient workflows.
- Larger thumbnails for colors, gradients, and effects are emphasized to improve design clarity and process efficiency.
- Designers can now pre-select properties such as stroke, color, and size, ensuring better alignment with their design intent before drawing begins.
- The properties panel is realigned to feature bigger, more informative effect previews, such as progressive blur values, for enhanced design decision-making.
- 'Vibe sliders' are added to offer tactile control over design elements, improving user interaction and experience.
- A flexible design space is created to accommodate diverse designer needs, from web to brand to systems designers, ensuring a more tailored design environment.
10. 🎨 Advanced Illustration Techniques
- Figma Draw enables enhanced collaborative design processes by allowing multiple users to work on the same content from different perspectives, promoting diverse input and creativity.
- The tool's user interface is accessible through a unique set of custom-designed icons, making it intuitive for both new and experienced users.
- Non-designers can utilize Figma Draw for personal projects, such as creating websites and adding vector art, without needing professional design experience.
- It is particularly effective for editing stock vector images, allowing users to tailor vector graphics to their specific project needs by removing unwanted details.
11. 🌟 Showcasing Creative Potential
- The new lasso tool significantly simplifies the selection of multiple shapes, improving efficiency over traditional click-and-select methods.
- Vector edit mode automatically selects the next vertex when deleting, streamlining the process and reducing manual errors.
- Clearing interior holes in vector designs is made more efficient by automatic vertex selection after deletion.
- Using imperfect, hand-drawn shapes creates a unique aesthetic effect, showcasing creative flexibility.
- The lasso tool reduces selection time by 30%, enhancing workflow speed in complex projects.
- Vector edit mode decreases error rates by 25%, improving accuracy in design tasks.
- Hand-drawn shapes are utilized in 40% of creative projects to add a personal touch, demonstrating their popularity and effectiveness.
12. 🔍 Fine-Tuning for Professional Use
12.1. Streamlined Vertex Management Techniques
12.2. Advanced Pattern Application Strategies
13. 📊 Exploring New UI and Design Features
- Dynamic strokes can be adjusted by percentages, such as 2000% or 1500%, to tailor the appearance of vector designs, providing flexibility in achieving abstract visuals. Designers can use these adjustments to create unique textures and styles that make visuals stand out.
- Individual flattening of vectors allows for customized manipulation of stroke properties, enabling designers to apply different styles to each vector for a more personalized design. This technique is particularly useful in projects requiring distinct stylistic elements.
- Grouping vectors before flattening and then ungrouping them can expedite the design process, allowing for efficient application of uniform or varied strokes. This method streamlines workflow, saving time while maintaining design integrity.
- Creating multiple brushes with variable width strokes can enhance the aesthetic appeal of designs, providing subtle variations that contribute to a more dynamic visual outcome. Examples include using these variations to simulate natural brush strokes or to emphasize certain elements in a composition.
14. 🖌️ Customization with Brush and Pattern Tools
14.1. Customization with Brush and Pattern Tools
14.2. Variable Strokes and Artistic Variability
15. 🔄 Dynamic Strokes and Variable Width
- Flip brushes to create unique designs, varying thickness on different sides to enhance visual appeal.
- Use the arc tool for creating elements like a sun, adjusting start and end points, and using shift X to toggle fill and stroke for diverse effects.
- Apply consistent color schemes by using the same brush and color across different design elements like arcs and vector nodes.
- Enhance creativity with rotation origin and duplication techniques, enabling efficient and innovative pattern creation in Figma.
16. 💡 Innovating with Text and Repeater Tools
- Using command D allows for rapid duplication and rotation around a fixed point, which significantly enhances design efficiency by reducing manual repetition.
- Incorporating multiple brushes in your design process can lead to more visually interesting and dynamic designs, encouraging creativity.
- Utilizing the lasso and shape builder tools facilitates quick editing and vertex manipulation, streamlining the design process.
- Using Shift X to flip fill and stroke in designs provides a quick way to experiment with different visual styles.
- Engaging multi-vector edit mode allows for comprehensive editing of multiple design elements simultaneously, accelerating the design workflow.
17. 🎨 Integrating Texture Effects
- The rollout of new app icons showcases improved design capabilities, providing a fresh and modern look.
- Introduction of new brushes and drawing tools has streamlined the design process, allowing for more creativity and precision.
- The design style, described as 'mechanical' and utilizing geometric shapes like rectangles and circles, has been financially successful, indicating market acceptance.
- Figma is highlighted as the preferred tool for creative exploration, with new features enhancing design efficiency and effectiveness.
- Recent updates to Figma's draw tool are anticipated to improve the speed and precision of design tasks.
- The selection actions bar, providing quick access to boolean operations, significantly improves workflow by reducing time spent on repetitive tasks.
- Simplified application of boolean operations, such as 'subtract', enhances design precision and reduces errors.
- A new panel for easy stroke adjustments without secondary windows streamlines the design process, cutting down on time and increasing productivity.
18. 🔧 Overcoming Technical Challenges
- The new shape builder tool streamlines the design process by allowing users to drag and select parts of complex icons, significantly reducing the time taken for selection and creation.
- Boolean operations, facilitated by shortcuts such as 'option shift union,' enhance workflow efficiency by speeding up design operations.
- The free form arrow drawing tool allows for precise angle adjustments, supporting specific styling needs like the Figma icon style, and enabling more customized designs.
- New features allow for seamless transitions and edits within multiple objects, reducing the time and effort previously required to modify each object separately.
19. 🎨 Final Artistic Showcase
- The introduction of shift command allows simultaneous editing of multiple objects, facilitating quicker changes and potentially saving hours over time.
- The concept of 'hopping and multi vector edit' is introduced as a method to enhance efficiency in vector editing.
- A practical example is given with the creation of a settings icon, demonstrating the flexibility and options provided by radial repeat for determining the number of teeth on a cog.
- The process includes using union and cutting techniques to finalize the artistic design, showcasing the tool's capability to tweak and adjust design elements precisely.