How DUTCH DESIGN AGENCY frees creativity with Figma

DUTCH DESIGN AGENCY is a creative branding agency based in Amsterdam, Doha, and Zürich. Since 2007, its multidisciplinary team of strategists, designers, developers, and producers has helped shape brands like Tommy Hilfiger, Rituals, and Karl Lagerfeld.

Creative Director and Founder Thomas André de la Porte says the agency is on a mission to elevate branded experiences through high-impact storytelling. However, while he champions technology for creativity’s sake, he’s conscious that technology can also tie up creative minds in process and protocols rather than ideation and innovation.

That’s why Thomas and his team developed a design ecosystem in Figma that removes friction, scales campaigns, and increases the amount of time agency staff can spend on digital excellence.

“Design is a process of decision-making. Figma lets us streamline the operational decisions, so our teams can focus on the creative ones,” says Thomas.

Challenge: Admin processes slowing down design

DUTCH DESIGN AGENCY is rooted in the resourceful culture of the Netherlands—a country that has long thrived on innovation, resilience, and collaboration.

“We’ve never had abundant natural resources or the perfect climate, but the Dutch have always turned necessity into invention, transforming challenges into creative solutions,” says Thomas.

Whether working with legacy fashion houses or fast-scaling lifestyle brands, the agency applies this problem-solving ethos by embracing new ideas, cross-cultural thinking, and digital tools to create impactful, future-ready experiences.

However, as all small- and medium-sized businesses can attest, hours quickly get eaten up by admin. Thomas says his designers were wasting precious time looking for brand files, fonts, colors, or dimensions, before they could get to work. And then as feedback from clients came in across different channels and assets, collaboration could get disjointed, and version control could spiral out of control.  

"Creative work needs time and space to flourish. And we were losing that time to layers of admin—like searching for the right specifications or manually updating the same change across dozens of assets," says Timo Groen, Senior Designer.

A Scalable System for Creative Excellence

In 2023, DUTCH DESIGN AGENCY transformed how it builds brand identities, websites, campaigns, social ads, and more for some of the most recognisable consumer brands in the world. How? Using Figma, FigJam, and Dev Mode. FigJam is used as a collaborative kick-off space to align on projects. People from across the agency found it ideal for running workshops, both internally and with customers, to ask questions, and to explore initial concepts. It helps the agency map ideas, structure content, and set direction fast, before moving into design.

Figma is the place for design. Each new project starts with a Figma template shaped by the agency’s methodology. This means that a non-designer (e.g., a project manager) can prepare everything in advance within a tailored brand environment, including colors, fonts, and tokens, allowing the designer to focus on the design. This provides structure, flexibility, and the ability to explore visual directions fast in the concepting phase. During design, everything from buttons to banners are built using reusable components for consistency and efficiency as assets pass from designers to developers. In addition, anyone on the team can contribute directly to maintain momentum.

"Using Design systems has increased creativity. Figma allows everyone to focus on what they need to do. Design is a process of decision making, and by using this process, many of the choices around “how to do the work” have been made—creating the space for the creative team to elevate what they do," says Shanti Botman, Senior Designer.

Once designed, all creative work can be viewed at once: agency staff and clients zoom in and out to see all of the assets from a campaign (e.g., a billboard, a landing page, a social media ad, a print ad, etc.). This makes it easy to share internally and to present to the customer for feedback, providing a single source of truth for the entire body of work, and collating all comments in one place. Nothing gets missed, agency staff and customers are on the same page, and amends can be updated instantly.

Once the campaign assets are complete, DUTCH DESIGN AGENCY uses Dev Mode to connect designs to digital assets. With all design specs, assets, and code snippets accessible in one place, developers can jump in and get exactly what they need whether it’s for a website build or email rollout. It eliminates guesswork and speeds up the development process significantly.

“When you’re creating upwards of 250 assets per campaign, Figma makes it much easier to manage. It also allows us to automate changes, so when a client wants to change a single thing—a color for instance—Figma makes the change across all our assets, saving our designers and developers many hours per project,” says Timo.

Results: Accelerated productivity through creative constraints

DUTCH DESIGN AGENCY is now expanding its Figma usage having seen the results.

“When you can trust the process you can focus on the work,” says Jannes Haagsman, Developer.

This streamlined workflow allows the agency to shift time into storytelling and brand elevation, rather than process-heavy tasks. Working as a team in one live document reduces friction, speeds up decision-making, and keeps everyone aligned in real time. The agency estimates that Figma has helped it achieve a 50% saving in productivity.

And if that weren’t enough, Figma has also brought agency staff and their customers closer together, providing a designated place for ‘always on’ feedback. Seamless collaboration without worrying about who’s got the latest version or whether all the details have been updated.

“Figma is more than just a design tool. It’s the foundation of how we collaborate, create, and deliver at speed. From kickoff to final export, Figma helps our team stay aligned, work seamlessly across disciplines, and bring ideas to life faster, smarter, and always on-brand,” says Thomas.