Noah Levin: AMA with Figma's VP of Design on their latest releases

23:59Noah Levin:You can see kind of the different inserts here, we were actively working on CMS right now. And, you know, and so that'll also be helpful for something like this, where it's very content driven. So I'm excited to wire that up later. Um, yeah, you know, yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's been a lot of fun. Um, yeah, a couple other quick examples. So I was a big fan of a company called Reed CV, uh, Andy Chung and crew built a really, really cool product that, uh, they got acquired by perplexity. And when they were going to shut down, I talked to Andy about, Hey, like, can, would you be okay if we like courted this to a big best sites?

24:33Noah Levin:Uh, you know, a lot of designers have put time into this and I don't know about you all building a portfolio is like intimidating. It takes all this time. A lot of people struggle with it. It's this thing that always falls off your to-do list. And I just kind of feel like at a certain point, just like a list or a resume or LinkedIn is easier, but just with a little bit more creative control. And then you can build onto it. So rather than trying to boil the ocean, or as they say, get the whole site done at once, start with the basics, which is just like maybe the projects you've worked on in text form, and then add to it over time when you want.

25:03Noah Levin:And so we built a plugin that lets you import your read CV stuff. But I wanted to show you code layers because that's kind of a really fun feature that really lets you bring things to life. And this is what I mean by like start with the basics and like build up to something more interactive and interesting. So in this case, we're using all the power of Figma Make to let you prompt things into reality. In this case, I just wanted some fancy interactions where I move my mouse around and the text kind of animates. And you can see my prompts over time. Just pretty simple. I want a fun hovering effect.

25:32Noah Levin:I don't know what it is yet. Let's explore, you know, and go back and forth and create it. And then that's great, because then when you actually want to play with it on a site, you can do that and it feels real. And you'll see I've added a few other code layers here. So up here on the top left, you can see that there's like a little bit of a hover effect, 3D effect going on. And as I move my cursor down, I have custom cursors. I have a custom animation all built with this code layers feature. And so all of it is done where I just kind of like have an area here and I just double click it. and you can see me kind of prompting the experience that I want into that section.

26:07Noah Levin:And so, you know, a lot of fun just to make simple things, but bring them to life with some prompts is something really exciting. And then, of course, all those cursors are just, you know, here. They're just referenced here and you can kind of update them on the fly. And so a few other things. My wedding site from a few years ago, I brought it into Figma site. So it's kind of fun to kind of see it come together. And one exciting news, My wife and I are expecting our first kid coming up. So actually the end of next month. And so I used Buzz actually for our baby shower, you know, putting together a bunch of options and working together on them.

26:43Noah Levin:And I used this feature called Bulk Create to basically take a spreadsheet of icebreaker questions because we wanted everyone to come together in our baby shower and talk about things that were special to them, you know, when they were a kid, things that, you know, that would be interesting. So I just took a spreadsheet where Vita then, my wife, not even needing to know what Figma Buzz was, could input all these interesting questions. And I could just bulk create it into this format and I can update them over time and change it. So just a lot of fun to kind of just bring a little bit of delight into our lives with some of these tools.

27:17Noah Levin:And, you know, yeah, so just wanted to share a couple of behind the scenes, personal, you know, moments using our tools there. That's great. You get a ton of congratulations in the comments. Yeah, that's very nice of you all. Thank you. Yeah, we're excited, baby girl. We're really excited about it. It's just, you know, we have no idea what we're doing. It's going to be fun. So just to close things out on this kind of, you know, this kind of pre-prepared slide set of stuff that I wanted to show you all, like, you know, obviously we're doing a lot with AI across all of our products. It's something we're thinking a lot about.

27:47Noah Levin:And you'll notice this show up in each of our products. And the beauty of having a platform like this is if you add something like the ability to edit an image using the latest image models, that's going to be helpful for you, whether you're in a design file, a slide deck, a brainstorm. We think a lot of these things compound, right? You make a change in one and it's the same platform, so it makes the change in a lot of them. We also are excited about how our tools bring people together and let you use the tools you're familiar with if you're a designer, you know, and then switching to a mode that you're more comfortable with if you are maybe a marketer, a PM, a developer, maybe not as comfortable with Figness tools.

28:21Noah Levin:And the last thing I wanted to say, I feel like when I got out of college, a lot of my impression of the corporate world or the world of building things looked something like this where, you know, there's someone presenting and everyone's listening or not listening, but just one person, the loudest voice in the room talking. And, you know, I just feel like working can and should be fun on some level. Like we spend eight or more hours a day doing this. We should enjoy it. And so I think about the tools that we try to create for people and the experiences that we want to make as collaborative, inclusive, accessible, exciting.

28:56Noah Levin:And if you look at that compared to that world where it's maybe just like kind of one person presenting from their desktop, but instead like we're creatively making a visual canvas of great stuff together. It just feels different. It feels nice. It feels fun. And so I hope that we can help you all take your ideas, make them real, navigate the, we sometimes call it the idea maze, right? You have all these different ideas and you don't know where they're going to go. And we hope that our tools let you, you know, bring in the, you know, a lot of these ideas faster. Things like Figma Make, you can almost skip to the end.

29:26Noah Levin:You can just skip to the end and see, was that idea actually interesting? Okay, cool. Let's find out. And, you know, if it was going to take you a week to build it, you would never know. But if it just takes you a little bit of time, and you can start to explore this maze in more interesting ways. So that's, yeah, that's my intro here. Excited to chat more and, you know, get into anything you're curious about, about the behind the scenes of this stuff or, you know, anything about teams and designing, whatever it is. Just really happy to be here and, you know, to hear about what you're all interested in and what you want from us and just glad to spend the time.

29:56Noah Levin:Fantastic. Well, thank you for that, Noah. That was such a wonderful overview. If you are new to Design Better AMAs or maybe new to Crowdcast, there's a little icon on the right, question mark inside of a chat bubble. That's where you ask your questions. We've got a lot of questions already in there. So I think we're just going to jump right in so we can make it through as many as we can here. Eli, where do you want to start? Let's start with the top questions. So in addition to asking questions, you can upvote questions. Right now, the most upvoted one is from Liz. and she's asking, what do you wish more junior UX designers understood about career growth?

30:34I'm sure you've seen folks at all stages of their career.

30:37Noah Levin:Yeah, sure have. And we actually have an early career program at Figma. We've been hiring interns and new grads since even when I started. So we've been investing in early career talent for a long time and something we really believe in. I think a lot of times when you're early in your career, you think about, you're looking for this checklist, maybe. Like you might be like, okay, what does it take to get promoted? Like, what is it, what do I need to get to get to my next stage of my career? And that's totally understandable. And, and, you know, there's a lot of different frameworks people look at when they're doing that.

31:08Noah Levin:But I think when you're early in your career, it can be almost overwhelming to know what to focus on. Like, oh, should I do this? Like, should I do that? Should I invest in being a better storyteller, visual designer, prototyper? And I think instead of trying to do everything, you know, just initially, if you can just try to focus on being helpful. like in using whatever one of those things you feel comfortable in in that early stage and not being afraid to use that superpower whether that again was how to tell a great story or make something look nice or whatever and and try to remember that not everything has to be your idea like when i when i was getting started i used to feel so protective about like oh i'm the designer like it's my job to like answer every question and like and that's a lot of weight to put on yourself but as we said earlier like nothing's great is made alone so like i early in my career I got lucky to work with these great engineers who had great design ideas.

31:58Noah Levin:And rather than pushing them away and being like, oh, that's not your job. That's my job. If you just listen and you just kind of be like, oh, wait, what is, sorry, what's that idea you had? Like, and take it into account. I feel like you can get a lot further. Like when you, when you see yourself as a helper, that's at least just how I operate in the world. Like I just like to be like, yeah, I want to help. All right. What are we doing? I think you can, you can accomplish a lot. And, and so you don't have to do everything, I guess is the main, main answer I have to this question. Like, just try to be helpful, you know, use whatever it is you are comfortable with to make a difference.

32:28Noah Levin:And, you know, and if it's helpful for you, we actually open sourced our career ladder at Figma, if that's interesting. So we can share the link in the chat. If you're curious to take a look, we open sourced it, we use FigJam. And so if that's interesting or helpful to you, you can see how we see career progression at Figma. That would be a very valuable resource. Yeah, we'd love to share that with everybody here. Oh, Eli, I think you're muted. Sorry about that. My vestibule was going off earlier. So a related question is, what would you say to a designer or developer who worries about how AI will affect their job role and career opportunities?

33:07This was something Aaron and I were intending to ask you is, you know, these blurring of boundaries between design and dev. And I'm sure that's what you're thinking about that in a product way a lot. But on the human side, how are you thinking about somebody that might be wanting to really prepare themselves for this very different career landscape?

33:24Noah Levin:Yeah, great question and very relevant and timely topic. So my belief is that it's getting easier and easier to make software, right? You can almost prompt software into existence now. But that's not always like if you think about what we do as designers, we're trying to make things useful, simple, usable, friendly. if you have an explosion of software, let's say you have a million apps you could download on your phone. Well, then what becomes important, right? What's important to you in like an attention economy when you don't want a million experiences like that? You probably just want a few meaningful ones.

33:56Noah Levin:Well, then design is what stands out the most. Design like your brand, the way you solve that problem, the way that you innovate and create something new. And the reason I'm starting with that context is that I actually think, this might sound like surprising to people, I actually think it's the best time to be a designer right now. Like there is so much demand. There's so much need for this because everyone is interested in participating in the process. They want to create things, but they often they need someone with the ingenuity, the talent, the creativity of a designer to help make their ideas better.

34:30Noah Levin:And I think that's even more true now in a world where you have more problems to work on. Like you can't move through the world and not as designers recurse sometimes to notice everything we wish were better. Like, you know, whether it's like, you know, working with our banks, institutions or forms or whatever in the world, there's clearly room for improvement. You know, while obviously AI has improved a lot, there's still no shortage of problems. And so there's no shortage of needs for designers. So that's the first thing is like, let's keep that context in mind that actually designers are very needed right now.

34:59Noah Levin:And we need you to keep making things to keep making things better. You know, that's the beauty of what we do. So the second thing is it's totally natural to be a little nervous or afraid of change, right? This happens a lot. And especially when some of these tools, like we're changing the way that we probably move around the world as quickly as we have been. It's unsettling. I don't think humans were like designed for that kind of rapid change. But actually, like probably the best thing you could do, I think, is approach some of this stuff with curiosity and with play. Like try to just play with it.

35:30Noah Levin:Try it out. So if you think of it as like this foreign alien material, you're like trying to figure out what it is and what it can do, what these models are good at. Most of us didn't go to school studying machine learning, you know, or, you know, we don't understand neural nets, whatever. So like, how do you, how do you as a designer show up? Well, you just try, you just play around. You try to understand, well, what do these models do? Great. So whatever, you know, use whatever tools you want to. And I know there's a lot out there. Use whatever one you want to start with and just play. Just try it out.

35:58Noah Levin:Like if you work in a design team, Maybe ask your manager, your team, hey, can we just take a Friday, take the morning? Can we just like try one of these new tools or try a few of them and just talk to each other? What did we learn? So I think the best way to move through anxiety is action. Like the best way to move through like uncertainty and not like, at least personally, I think it's like, you just feel better when instead of ruminating and like worrying about what's gonna happen to us, like you just try. Like you just, I know it's not always that simple, but it's just, I just feel like that's a start, you know, and that's what I would say.

36:30I think that's a great point, Noah. And that's something, you know, we've been running these workshops that are sort of design plus AI workshops for teams at Google and Waymo. And these teams are building these tools, but they often don't have time to really play around with it or, you know, explore how they might, you know, use them within their workflow as a team. So if you can do that, like Noah said, get a day together or shameless plug, come run one of the design workshops with us. Happy to do that. It's just an opportunity to explore, get some creative confidence and, you know, it's fun too.

37:07Absolutely. All right. Let's jump into another question. All right. Here's our current top voted question. What are your recommendations for bridging the gap between design? our design system and the component library, Storybook and GitHub, you're on sync and design to development time is slow for enhancements and new components.

37:27Noah Levin:Yeah, great question, Heather. This is a big focus for us, actually. So when we built DevMode, a huge part of what we wanted to do was make the relationship between designers and developers and the tools we each use more symmetric, right? Make them feel more fluid and collaborative. So if you haven't already tried it, CodeConnect is one way to get at the area you're interested in. We can share a link in the chat to a handbook we wrote to kind of work through some of these challenges. Obviously, when you think about what the holy grail is here, you just want everything to always be in sync. Whatever is you're designing should match what's in production.

38:04Noah Levin:Whatever's in production should match what you're designing. And we know it takes a lot of work to get there, especially if you work at a larger company and there's a lot of different componentry to work through. But we are actively working a lot in this area. And we think it's important for your design language, your design system to mirror what your developers are building, of course. And so we think CodeConnect is a good start. Recommend checking it out. And we are actively heavily investing in areas like it to make that even better. What you were showing, you know, you're talking about Figma Make and design systems, like connecting that stuff together.

38:38That is amazing. That is super exciting.

38:41Noah Levin:Yeah, we feel like, you know, there are just entire organizations, design systems teams, right? If you're a company like Google or Microsoft, there might be like 100 of you. If you're a smaller team, you're a five of you. That's your every day is building this like system that can scale the design language of your company. And we've invested so much at Figma in building tools for that. And so it's only natural that we should make sure that that is helpful in the AI world and that the investments you've made. I think of it as, look, AI is great when it has context. Like it can't operate without context.

39:13Noah Levin:And design system is amazing context. You've already written guidelines and descriptions and, you know, you've given so much context. It just makes sense that these models should be able to leverage that. Yeah. And what you said, too, that a third of your customer base are developers. You know, presumably developers are in Figma on a regular basis. And there's such a blurring of roles where designers are vibe coding and developers are, you know, vibe designing. So the idea of having your design system connected to AI prompts would help a developer work through, you know, maybe these more esoteric pieces of an app that a designer might not be able to have the time, the bandwidth to get to and get pretty close, like get to a pretty good spot following a standard design system.

40:05Noah Levin:That's right. Yeah. I mean, so much of design is communication and language. And right now, our teams are not always speaking the same language, right? The ways that they think about building, you know, might be sometimes different. The words we use, the way we describe how something should look and feel. So hopefully over time, like you said, there's a blurring and a blending because behind that language, we actually have goals and those goals are actually the same usually. Like we all want to build successful, helpful, easy to use, performant, fast, delightful products. And doing that is a shared goal, whether you're identify as a designer, a developer, a PM, a researcher.

40:39Noah Levin:And so, yeah, I totally agree. There's kind of this blurring happening here where, you know, designers should be able to be more comfortable writing code. I also believe, hot take, not so hot take, I don't know, developers should be designing too. Like they understand the nuance of interaction design because they're the ones building it most of the time. And so it should be symmetric. We should be building our designs. They should be designing things they're building. That's my belief is that we should be working more collaboratively. Awesome. All right. So let's see. Here's our next top voted question.

41:14How do you think about hiring and scaling design teams in the AI age?

41:20Noah Levin:yeah we've been talking a lot about this in a lot of different ways um and i think it's like hiring scaling i would use another word like enabling right like it's not always about like scale and growth sometimes it's also just about how do we as designers uh feel and empowered be more efficient use these tools to to do our jobs better um and there is there's a lot to do there and again so i think the first thing i think about is how do we inspire people i'm not the kind of person who likes to lead by like mandates. Like you all must use these AI tools or we're not going to hire you if you haven't, if you haven't like personally built something with cursor.

41:57Noah Levin:Like obviously we look to people who are curious and who are playing with these new tools and who are exploring and who are willing to be bold and create. But we also think a great way to lead is to inspire. And a great way to do that is even as leaders, as whatever, directors, managers, VPs, I personally believe we should be hands-on, not in like an overly the top micromanaging way, whatever, but we should lead by example and we should be willing to be courageous and try some of these tools and to show what's possible. And so I think there's a big part of our philosophy here. We're trying to figure out, well, how do we do that?

42:30Noah Levin:Like, what are the right ways to both get access to these tools, to let people try them, to encourage people to use them and to see really what's possible when you do that. So yeah, I think there's, you know, when I think of hiring scaling, again, to me, I think it's more around enabling. Like how do we just make sure that people are successful? So one example, we are now actively looking at a role called AI model designer. Okay, what does that mean? Like why are we hiring like an AI model designer? What is that? And my belief is you're going to see this. You're going to see more and more companies hire this role or look to their designers to do it.

43:07Noah Levin:And what this means to me is we need to figure out where we have this new technology, right? This new capability and designers need to work to understand it, to shape it, to sculpt it, to mold it, to get the best work you can out of it, which means understanding what these models are good at. What means, so I don't know how many of you in the audience know what like evals are. Like evals are when you're working in AI models, you are assessing something, an output from your prompt, right? You have a prompt, you have an output from what your ideal state was. And someone has to decide, was that good or was that not good?

43:36Noah Levin:and you know if you're working in a text experience you could or like in a medical field there might be was the answer accurate if you're like us and working in a design field you're like is this design good which can be subjective right it can be how objective versus subjective is it there are some things that are i think more objective like clean typography and hierarchy and so on but we need designers to actually sit with ml researchers directly and live and breathe these evals these processes around it and things like, you know, system prompts. I don't know how many of you work in, are using AI tools in your companies, but generally there is a system prompt, which is just human language, right?

44:15Noah Levin:Text behind the system that is steering and guiding the way you're using the model. And I would love for more designers and UX writers or whoever to get involved in the system prompt. Like why not? Like why not understand how this stuff is getting built? Because increasingly it's plain language. It's, it's language that you all hopefully know and are comfortable with. So I'm a big believer that you're going to need, whether you are a model company or not, right? You don't have to be, you know, open air, anthropic, meta, you know, whatever to do this. Like you will already be wrapping around these models or fine tuning them.

44:49Noah Levin:So you might as well get comfortable understanding what evals are, what system prompts are, how to guide them, how to steer them and how to train these models to do a better job. Like if we're just trying to create better outcomes, why not get closer to the work? So it's new to us. It's new to you. It's due to everyone. No one knows what they're doing in some of this stuff, I think, if we're truly honest. But we need to get in there and be valuable and understand how to help. So I would guess that increasingly we're going to see roles like this in the future. It's fascinating.

45:21Right. Keeping myself on mute. What resources do you recommend to keep up with all these new apps and features? It is overwhelming. YouTube channels, other I have one resource I'll add in the chat, but what do you use Noah to explore new tools?

45:39Noah Levin:Yeah, I, you know, social media is honestly where I spend the most time. So I would say like X and threads are probably the two places that I like kind of look for what designers are making, using, sharing, you know, obviously there's things like product hunt and other places where people share their, the latest and greatest. Definitely there's YouTube channels, TikToks, really great people helping to teach these new tools. So I think, you know, once you've identified a way to try something, like to me, it's like less that I care about getting the fire hose of daily information. You can even, if you work in a design team, there's probably someone in your team who's going to be doing that naturally.

46:16Noah Levin:They might be the one that's already in the channel being like, oh, have you tried this new thing? So it doesn't always have to be you. But once you hear about it, just I encourage you to find space and time to try it out. And if you need to, if you're worried about, well, I never have the time, maybe there's a way to use it for work, for the project you have in front of you or for your personal life or whatever it might be. And trying to apply it to something where there's already a natural goal. So you feel like that time was invested towards something if there wasn't otherwise time to play and explore.

46:46That's great. I'm dropping the link in here. This is a site called Studio Labs that sort of, it's kind of like product hunt for AI design tools. So that's one place that's pretty regularly updated. I like Noah's recommendation here of finding a personal project that you're excited about and then, you know, building that. That's kind of what Eli and I have been doing. We're using AI, a variety of AI tools in so many different ways, just on fun little things. You know, it could be I want to learn something. So you start to use ChatGPT or Cursor or whatever it is in different ways. It might be that you want to build something very quickly.

47:28it's just like finding a personal project and pursuing that making it a priority spending some time every day i find that to be the best i do you know look on youtube for some videos just to see how some people are solving problems and that's some inspiration but the greatest inspiration is just having something you like to do and see if you can do it with the existing tools yeah it can even be like a really silly idea i've mentioned this on other amas but you know at one point I was listening to Rick Rubin's podcast. I thought he just has a very unique style. We'll say, amazing, interesting. I thought, let's be cool to make a Rick Rubin synthesizer.

48:07So I pulled a few samples and, you know, dropped it into chat GPT and designed the synthesizer within 20 minutes or other. So it can be silly ideas like that, that, you know, you just want to make something, you know, go do it. It's easy to say. Fantastic. Next question. All right. Uh, let's see here. Aaron, is one standing out to you? We've got a couple here at the top. I'm trying to get to some other folks. Yeah. Haven't answered, asked questions yet. This one's pretty broad here from Liz. Uh, what emerging trends in design are you most excited about?

48:44Noah Levin:Yeah. Great question. I think there are, there are like different kinds of trends, I guess. There's like how we, how we work kind of trends. And then there's sort of like what we make kind of trends. Right. And I think maybe I'll answer each of them. So for how we work trends, I have always been a huge fan of prototyping. You know, what do they say? A prototype is worth a thousand meetings. I absolutely believe that. And historically, I used to teach designers how to code. And that used to be the way that I thought the best prototypes could be made. And if you think about emerging trends and moments, you might not have to code at all because these tools are so good at prompting things but using code behind the scenes.

49:31Noah Levin:And so whether that's through code editors and submitting code yourself with tools like Cursor or Copilot or Windsurf or whatever, or using Figma Make to prompt something to prototype it so that you can show up at that meeting with a prototype instead of a bunch of mockups. It's just easier. The fidelity of feedback gets better. So from that trend, I would say prototyping is my answer easily any day. Like that's to me so, so helpful is to explore using the materials that your end users will be using, the actual product. And the closer we can get to simulating that experience, the better our design ideas will be.

50:08Noah Levin:So that's the how we work trend that I would say. I think for the what we make piece trends, that's a good one. So love it or hate it, I'm a fan of liquid glass. I'm going to say it. I'm inspired by what Apple's doing, and I'll tell you why. You know, the last like 10 years of design tools, you've had what? Rectangles and shapes, vectors, right? You've had text, you know, you've got color, hierarchy type, whatever around that. We haven't really given designers that many new means of expression and over this time, right? Like we've enabled things like design systems to make it a lot easier to scale the work using those primitives.

50:51Noah Levin:But there's so many more materials in the world. There's so many. If you look at the world around you and you feel inspired by the way wind moves through, you know, grass or trees, like all this stuff, like we don't express that in our software. We could. And I think what Apple did, what I thought was really cool, and I know there's a lot of work to do. I think people are way too harsh on betas. Like it's they've got time to iron out the kinks. I know that it's not accessible right now. And I believe that they'll improve that. They have been. But they took inspiration from the real world, the way that things refract, you know, the way that things look with different physical materials.

51:24Noah Levin:And they found a way using things like shaders and other, you know, interesting code tactics to render that in software. And so I'm a big fan of things like shaders, a big fan of designers getting new materials to work with. And I think this is helpful because if everything in the world starts to look the same and everything starts to feel the same, we often want to feel inspired. We want both familiar things. There's nothing, sometimes there's nothing bad with consistency, things feeling familiar. That's great. Like, of course we need patterns like tab bars in our mobile apps. But at a certain point, people also crave something new.

51:58Noah Levin:They crave something that makes them feel something, right? And so I'm a big fan of this trend with liquid glass that Apple is doing. I think it's cool that the company invested and designed so heavily to explore these different kinds of materials. And I think that that is one of hopefully hundreds and hundreds of materials that we can start to play with. And so, again, I'm very confident that they will improve the accessibility of the feature over time. It's a very early version. They've committed and shown a commitment to that in the past. They're at the forefront often with a lot of their tooling.

52:29Noah Levin:It'll take time. So we have to, as an industry, be patient and, of course, explore and be creative. But yeah, I just think there's something really magical about having new materials to work with at our disposal.

52:45absolutely cool so we definitely have probably more questions than we can get to this time we'll try to be kind of behind the scenes answer some of them if we can with you know support article or link if there's a clear you know answer there um let's see here's a question from it's kind of interesting one print print design um i used to do that a bit with a magazine we do a lot of print work and we're wondering if figma plans to introduce more tools to support print-focused workflows in the future?

53:14Noah Levin:Yeah, that's a good question. You know, we would definitely love to hear more from you or anyone doing print, what you're looking for, what kinds of stuff you need. You know, we've heard sort of requests around things around CMYK and different kinds of, you know, color profiling work. You know, already in Figma, you'll notice that in the default frame templates, both in Figma Buzz, which could be great for this kind of use case, as well as Figma Design, you'll see that there is tabloid paper, other kinds of defaults, and so you don't have to think too heavily about pixel conversion. So, yeah, it's definitely an interesting one.

53:44Noah Levin:I can't speak to like our future of math in general, but I'm always interested in hearing what you want to make from print materials and what it is that you feel like you're craving and what's missing. Personally, I've used in my own personal life like Figma for a lot of, you know, print like materials for our wedding, like all the signage, all the, you know, all the different place cards and menus. I designed myself all in Figma. And so I think it's already possible today, but there's absolutely more to do if you and would love to hear what what you're looking for. We too have used Figma for a limited number of print things, and it's been great for us.

54:16Yeah. This one, the next one here from Mike Neff, I resonate with. He's asking about, he says, even with the addition of AI, building and polishing tables in Figma is time-consuming and repetitive. We designed so many tables. How's Figma working to make that experience great? I've worked with tables in Figma during COVID. I worked with the Africa CDC, creating a tracker for the continent of Africa for cases for each country and lots of data for epidemiologists. So we worked with a lot of big tables. I found some great plugins that helped me, but maybe you've got some other recommendations.

55:00Noah Levin:Yeah, great question. There's definitely a lot of improvement we have to make here. You know, it got a little bit easier in some ways with grids, which shipped to config this year. But we know that that's far from the holy grail of tables. And it's definitely something we talk about a lot. I know Dylan, the CEO, personally cares a lot about this use case and brings it up often as something he would love for us to improve. So it comes up often. We know that it's a common use case. We also know that we've, you know, there's different kinds of tables, right? Even in FigJam, you have a table primitive in slides as well.

55:30Noah Levin:and we have to sort of reconcile sometimes like what kind of table primitives are right for what context. And sometimes a lightweight, simple one works great. Other times you actually need a lot of detail and fidelity because each cell contains its own component. And so lots to explore. Grids might help you out for now and hopefully more to come. Yeah. Great.

55:55On you. I think I've learned by now. We've only done this, you know. 50 times. Okay, so let's see here. There was one that I thought was a good one. Sorry, I'm losing it amidst the stream of questions here. Bear with me. Okay, yeah. So, Noah, you mentioned a third of your users is developers and another third is designers. Every product requires collaborations between design and dev. Do you share your experience or any advice to create more collaborative, fun experiences or relationships between design and does. She's finding tension more prevalent in many work environments.

56:34Noah Levin:Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question. And I think it's probably true of a lot of different kinds of relationships in the world. It's like, how do you have a good communication? How do you improve how to work together? And, and you know, I think a lot of it's about understanding each other. So a lot about like, well, what, where are they coming from? What are their goals? What's important to them? hopefully they'll show the same interest in you and what you're trying to build as a designer throughout. A couple things. I often like to, if they haven't, people want to feel heard, right? And if they have an idea and they feel like you're ignoring it because you believe it's a bad idea, and it could be a bad idea, I don't know.

57:10Noah Levin:Even just taking a minute to hear them out and try it out, especially these new tools, Figma Make, whatever, you can make something feel pretty pretty real pretty quickly. If only to say, you know, here's why I think that isn't a great idea. And so trying to not immediately show up with resistance is one thing to do. And, you know, making sure that they feel connected to part of the problem. A lot of times, you know, designers will say like, you know, I wish I was in the room earlier, right? Or I wish I was involved earlier. Developers often will feel the same way. And that's not everyone. Some developers are actually like, you know what?

57:41Noah Levin:I just need to know what I need to build. I don't care about everything behind it. That's fine. A lot of developers, and increasingly so, care. They want to be a part of the process of why we're doing what we're doing. They want to feel the value that they spent. Think about how many hours they spend fixing bugs or trying to make something real. If you didn't care about what it was for, you probably wouldn't either put as much work into it or wouldn't feel as good. So I think just involving them early, I know it's kind of classic advice, but I think it's true. Getting them involved in making designs together even and being creative and discussing things.

58:11Noah Levin:But I think it's hard to give blanket advice for how to work with developers, unfortunately, I find, because different developers have different ways of working, different teams have different goals, different companies have different processes. So those are a couple ideas to get you going, but you'd really have to debug the specifics of that relationship. There's a proverb, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. I think that very much applies to this designer-developer relationship. A prototype can be a super powerful thing, but it can also give the impression to your developer partners that you've already got it figured out.

58:47Now just go execute on what we have here. So to the degree you can sit down together and work through some ideas where they have input, they're involved in that creation process, that can be huge. And just building some bridges. So we're getting close to the wrap up here. there's definitely the list of questions and we'll try to provide some links in the After Effects when we send this out. But Noah, is there anything that we haven't touched on that you'd like to answer or any questions that stand out to you here?

59:24Noah Levin:Yeah, let me scan through the questions and see if there's any ones I can kind of quickly get to or end on. Let's see. Yeah, and these are great and keep it coming. I mean, I think, as I mentioned earlier, like we have learned so much from the community and truly, genuinely want to know what it is that you need from us, what you're hoping for, what you want to see. So there's no right or wrong way to get that to us. You can use social media. You can use our forums. You can use that little question mark on the bottom right of the tool and submit it there. Just I think, honestly, that's the most important thing to me to end on is like, don't be shy.

1:00:04Noah Levin:Like, you have so many good ideas as designers. You probably have an intuition of what you wish we did. Let us know. You know, I can't say how important it is for us as we shape our roadmaps to know what it is that you're looking for. Now, it's not always about that. Obviously, the faster versus things, sure. But we've really learned a lot from you all as a community and, you know, hope to continue to.

1:00:29Yeah, absolutely. There are a couple small questions in here. you know, like baseline shift on lines of text and RIMs and M's for text sizing, those sorts of things, which, you know, those are interesting.

1:00:43Noah Levin:We will collect all of these and I will send them internally. And so, yeah, keep it coming in the chat or Q &A or whatever. We'll definitely make sure this gets back to the team. Yeah. I've got one question here from Liz. I know Liz asked a question earlier, but I think this is a good one to end on. What key lessons did you take from working on the latest version of Figma? Oh, that's a good one.

1:01:11Noah Levin:Yeah, you know, we're getting, if you think about the experience of having eight products at Figma now, it, you know, my methods of helping to, you know, improve them or guide or shape the team have to change because I can no longer, you know, be involved in every detail of every product. There's so many products. There's so much to do, so much to learn. So I think I've learned a lot about, you know, choosing a few, choosing, picking a few and delegating, of course, and distributing that responsibility across them, figuring out, you know, how to still be helpful and help my team be helpful throughout doing that.

1:01:50Noah Levin:You know, I think we have an increasing audience in the company, right? If you think about all the different people coming to Figma, and I think we're continuing to learn about what those different audiences need. And so that's a big lesson for me is like, for example, with Buzz and marketers, like I haven't personally spent enough time in my career understanding the needs of marketers and how they get the word of your company out and tell those stories. And so I think there's a lot of lessons about, oh, right, like probably need to start understanding that. I think we understand designers somewhat well, but maybe not all of these other creative fields.

1:02:21Noah Levin:So I think that's a big lesson too, is like, how do we invest more time in understanding those different audiences as well? Fantastic. It's a great place to wrap. Noah, thank you so much for taking time to chat with us today. You started us with this point that Figma's driving forces community, and I think this speaks volumes to that point that spending time here with the Design Better community and a lot of other folks who joined us for the first time. If you're new to Design Better, maybe you've not signed up or you want to go deeper into design, visit designbetterpodcast.com. Lots and lots of great stuff that's there for free.

1:03:00And if you want to go deeper into the books and all the recordings from our past AMAs, they're all there to explore. But thank you again, Noah. Thank you, everybody, for attending, for asking questions. Just a reminder, this was recorded. this recording will be right here at this exact URL in your browser shortly. It's just going to take a minute for the video to process. We'll email it out to anyone who registered and we'll post it on our website shortly too. So thank you one and all. We greatly appreciate it. Thank you, Noah. Thank you, Figma. Thanks for bringing us lots of cool design tools.

1:03:37Noah Levin:Thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. This has been awesome. Thanks everybody. Take care.