Bringing the community together in Figma

Figma started with an idea by a student and his teaching assistant that design should live on the Web. Fast forward to 2020, we’re entering a new decade with a team of 150 employees and a user base that spans almost every country in the world. While scaling can be hard at times, growth also means we’re better equipped to realize our vision of making design accessible for everyone and to better serve our community in countless new ways.

For us, serving the community takes on a few different forms. How can we at Figma better connect with our users online and in-person? How can we better connect the community with each other? And with hundreds of thousands of users in Figma everyday, how can we bring these users together in our product?

Here are a few new ways we’d like to better serve all of you this year.

More IRL opportunities to meet and share

We’re kicking off the year with Config, our first user conference, in San Francisco on February 6, 2020. Because the majority of the programming was developed by our community, you’ll find the participatory style of Config to be different than other conferences. At Config, you can engage in topics that you and your peers care about, like…

• Soleio, who’ll share why open source design matters
• Elizabeth Lin, Akinbiyi Adetunji, and Namnso Ukpanah, who’ll discuss how can we better develop the next generation of designers

…and learn from real-life experiences that are relatable:

• Linda Eliasen, who’ll share tips on finding confidence in design decisions
• Jason Kunesh, who’ll share what it was like to redesign Chicago.gov

Check out the full agenda here. We hope you can join us in-person (general admission tickets go on sale today!) or tune in online.

And if you can’t make it to San Francisco, have no fear. We’re working with community leaders in cities around the world to bring more Figma events near you. Throughout 2020, we have plans to launch user groups in more cities. If you’re interested in being a community leader for your city, we’d love to hear from you .

There for you whenever you need support

Today, our passionate customer service team supports North American and European business hours. But we know our customers are in more places than that. That’s why we’ve recently moved our support tech stack over to Zendesk to better serve all of our global customers.

Throughout 2020, you’ll see new support offerings come online—a new Help Center to self-serve product knowledge, new forums to get support from fellow community members, and streamlined processes on our side for faster service. 

More features for you—and your entire product team

2019 saw new features like Plugins, Auto Layout, Smart Animate, OpenType support, and Design System Analytics to name a few. We have bigger plans for Figma in 2020. 

First and foremost, shipping innovative features that boost creative productivity by removing the manual, repetitive parts of design work will always be at our core. But designing great products is a team sport and that means Figma needs to also work great for your entire product team, including engineers, product managers, and other folks critical to your development process.

Our CEO Dylan Field and VP of Product Yuhki Yamashita will be sharing more details about our 2020 product roadmap live from Config, so join us in San Francisco or online if you can. Otherwise, follow us on Twitter and keep a look out for email updates coming soon to your inbox.

A richer, more open design community

Seeing how designers habitually share their work with one another inspired us to launch the beta of Figma Community last October. To date, over 300 creators have published 600 files for others to inspect, remix, and learn from—resources like useful templates, hands-on education guides, public libraries, and more.

In 2020, we want to enable more creators to add more resources, so the Figma Community becomes a place where professional and aspiring designers alike can easily discover new ideas and learn from the brands and people they admire via the simple act of sharing a Figma file. If you’re not part of the Figma Community beta yet, join in.

Got ideas?

If you have ideas on how we can better bring our community together or what sorts of events you’d like to see, just write us note at community@figma.com. 2020 is going to be an exciting year, and we can’t wait to build a stronger Figma community, together.