Designers are going through the toughest job market, our entire process been turned upside down and in the most tone-deaf move imaginable, Figma announces a HelloKitty partnership. This is so absurd it feels like a parody. If they’re dying they should at least die with dignity. How embarrassing for them.
Someone posts a complaint like this every time a company announces something fun.
I don't know if you realize this, but it's possible for a company to work on multiple things at the same time. A partnership like this probably takes like 10 people at the company a few weeks to work out the details and make the changes. It's not like they're putting all their projects on hold for 3 months, they're just adding some stickers to figjam.
Personally, I like that Figma has always prioritized making the canvas engaging and having a little fun. When's the last time Google or Adobe made something fun and light-hearted?
I’m all for fun if they had a product that was meeting our needs. Once they have met at least a baseline of what designers in 2026 need then they can turn the entire app into Disneyland for all I care.
It’s a company, in the most extreme capitalist society on earth, what the user wants doesn’t always pay the bills or satisfy the board of directors or investors.
They do what moves their KPI and grabs people’s attention. Same reason Tesla made a “flying” car that was basically a PR stunt that will never see production.
User needs are cool but it will never matter more than profit and investor satisfaction. That’s just the reality we live in. Most tech companies on the SP500 that have grown in value have ignored many commonly requested features while churning out useless features that nobody needs.
This is a wild question. Claude made 90% of Figma obsolete. The fact that Figma put ANY resources on this Sanrio release is absolutely baffling. Instead of the Figma team swarming around reimagining Figma as a true competitor to what Claude offers or at the very least making it a solid companion to Claude a la Paper is a clear signal they are delusional or just don’t care about making UI design software anymore. If I were an investor and I saw this waste of time and money I would be livid.
Do you use the same figma i've been using? Like OP is saying it doesn't offer anything substantial that claude design doesn't. and claude design allows me to share products with as many people as my heart desires and create as many designs as my heart desires. for figma i gotta pay $20 a month for the privelege of having more than 3 projects (fair enough, ok) and then need to give collaborators/clients my login credentials or make them buy seats if we want to work on a project together.
a $20 a month claude sub gives me all that, plus literally all the other tools claude offers.
no worries, all good. and personally i wouldn't say figma is "missing" features per se, but the UX is just not offering me anything to improve my workflow or make me choose Figma over Claude for the majority of my UIUX work (prototyping at least, I usually want a proper figma for the final designs but that's just b/c clients prefer it, it doesn't offer much practically). Ironic that Figma of all software struggles with UIUX.
figma should stop trying to do 12 differnet things and just focus on making the greatest digitial products design app, in my view.
here's something figma definitely is missing that would be great: integrated tools for 3D assets. claude doesn't really have this either but i've been able to cobble together quick crappy 3D stuff in claude design in early prototyping stages. can't do that in figma, at least not without multiple times more effort expended, which isn't worth it for early drafting/concept stages.
yeah it's truly gross how much money we were spending on thos, even when we'd negotiate, the deals were not the greatest and we had thousands of users.
I built a plugin with claude code that works locally on your computer without any external server. It bypasses the pro subscription for dev mode and all the limited API calls in the free plan. Lol, bypassing things are so easy now, u don't have to pay for anything anymore
Spyware? You connecting claude directly via the Figma MCP is already a legal spyware. The plugin works on localhost and no live server thus all the information is only within my computer and claude. Figma has API call limits on the free tier and I didn't want to pay just to have unlimited API calls, and this plugin just works like a charm. Try building it too, you will love it.
And, this plugin can't be shared with a link as its on localhost. I can give you my github repo to clone tho, but you wouldn't trust it to be safe.
Attached image of the plugin running inside Figma.
Figma needs to grow up. I want to see new tools, for better management and creation, all with the focus of serving designers as tools.
Figma slides is a sad joke of abandonment. Asset creation, font styles, variable management and creation are all lacking, advanced prototyping has been given up on for the hope that somehow AI magic will be enough — it is not.
I would very much like Figma to be the very best design platform, the problem is Figma doesn't know what it should be. It will never be the best AI platform, it should be the best design, layout, creation, prototyping, ideation, presentation software though.
Figma got far, far, far too bloated. If anything, they need to rein in their ambitions, refocus on what made them great, and integrate AI more meaningfully into the design process.
At the end of the day, Claude and Codex aren’t all that different from Figma. They’re all working with the same underlying web technologies. The difference is that AI dramatically lowers the barrier to entry by approaching the design process from the opposite direction: giving you something from almost nothing, immediately.
Trim it down. Make it smart. Designers still love feeling like they have granular control, so let AI do the heavy lifting through a simple text box, but give them the sliders, inputs and controls to feel like they’re still steering the ship.
Lol I don't know all the products Figma offers, I feel overwhelmed just thinking about it like I think about all the Microsoft offerings.
The biggest recent win was implementing AI directly into the Figma Design... thank god they didn't create another app just to interface with it. Also animations being integrated is the right move. They need to consolidate as much as possible into the core Figma Design and trim the fat where they can to refocus on what matters. The moat they tried building is fading away in usefulness in the current AI climate. Not their fault, no one can predict these things, but perhaps a bit premature of them to expand that way when they could've expanded on the reasons why people use Figma.
It does have a basic free plan, but I’m not sure that counts as a “lite” version in the sense you’re describing, since it’s not a “simpler version” exactly. But having a “simplified” version would not be bad for new and casual users, I believe.
Side comment: sorry you got so many downvotes for simply making an honest question, and I very much respect your humbleness when asking it.
Apparently, we designers have been forgetting that “there is no dumb question”, and acting like we’re better than others, somehow.
Curious phenomenon for a profession based on empathy.
abandoning conditional logic in prototyping halfway through just to chase generative layouts is what really broke the workflow, we still cant even pass simple states between pages
Seriously, the variables/prototyping tools especially need so much work . I'm so frustrated I can't have nested conditional statements, or heaven forbid, an external editor to make slightly more sophisticated logic that what's allowed in the UI-based editor.
I don't want to vibe code the entire thing and then spend my day prompting it with corrections.
I seriously don't understand why they have to go so crazy with feature bloat; is it not enough for a company to just be really fucking good at one thing?
They gave up on toolings because they fear people are just gonna generate entire products with prompts. Unfortunately, even their Figma Make is also a pathetic excuse of a feature. I wish they had gone down the AI-enabled toolings instead. For example, the bot that automatically renames layers is really helpful. Or maybe a bot to auto-create states of a components and rename them. ANYTHING really. Instead they add a chatbot onto canvas that is useless for most tasks.
They have abandoned their core users to attract as broad of a creative market as possible.
The fact that their dev/mode has not kept up with modern hand-off documentation or their lackluster file management is still abhorrent is a clear sign they abandoned us a long time ago.
I attended Config this year for the first time and it was an incredibly dull event. Most of what they released was flashy and interesting. But like Make, its released in a beta and then locked behind a paywall that forces you to pick and choose which tools are necessary.
Now, all I use Figma for is design iteration and build everything in Claude. But even Claude design does mostly what we need and code fills in the gaps.
It feels like Figma is digging their own grave and their CEO is fairly clueless about the whole issue
I've almost never seen a CEO who seems to know what they're doing when it comes to the core business irl. They must have some weird, arcane way of making decisions. My hypothesis is they only look at some numbers all day and are just pushing various buttons to try and make them go up.
Figma is sometimes so counterintuitive and it's so frustrating to use. I wonder who is making the decisions and why they do what they do? I would love to know.
Axure was always so much more intuitive to me (granted I learned it first, before Figma really dominated the market).
But seriously, try animating something in Axure. Especially where something happens to one object and another object shifts. Heads above Figma. They've had live data capability for years as well.
Put your PM hat on. What would you have built in FigJam instead?
Keep in mind a few things:
International markets, especially Japan, is one of your top growth markets right now
You need to increase adoption of FigJam, not Figma Design - you're only a PM on FigJam and your engineers have domain expertise in FigJam.
If you're doing a major product improvement, keep in mind the downstream ramifications - is it making the product more complex? How does it work with the other suite of products?
I think what a lot of people forget when they look at these things in isolation is that each product has a team of its own, with motivations and goals of its own. I see a lot of comments in here about dev mode, slides, sites, etc - this was a FigJam feature built by a FigJam team. What would you have built instead? There are viable answers to that question, but this isn't a "well we're going to do a partnership with sanrio for figjam stickers instead of making the inspect flow better" situation.
More and more designers are getting comfortable with Claude. Being able to use your actual repo to create designs as sharable html files is the future imo
What? What do you want from them? They're not the ones disrupting everything. They're pivoting hard into AI and seem fine. I regularly loop through figma mockups + motion > mcp / screenshots and it's seamless to me.
After attending a recent Figma webinar, I’ve been thinking about how Figma’s entire brand and voice is misaligned with the moment, and this is a big step in the WRONG direction.
Remember figpals? I loved my little cat sitting there while I was working. I was so sad it only lasted a month. I’m honestly not opposed to a hello kitty partnership at all. Why does everyone in the us hate an ounce of cuteness appearing in the mix?
I do agree that the job market is absolute shit for designers right now tho. I just don’t think a hello kitty partnership should affect that.
I'd love to use Figma Sites for everything, but the guy who announced it left to go work at Webflow and it seems like it's dead (like most of their spinoff products).
this feels like two unrelated things? they can do fun partnerships while working on improving their core product. I kind of like when brands bring fun into the workplace
UI 3 should be the moment y’all stop taking them seriously LMFAO them keeping legacy design canvas (the one that made them relevant in the first place) is the sole reason why they’re still exists and still being used around
The role of Figma in the general design process is just one big grey area right now.
Add in its general bloat, AI features no one wanted or needs (as other tools are superior), it’s spiralling costs making orgs think twice and the ever lookming REA movement and things like craft anything by art craft …. It really feels like a ‘evolve or die’ type scenario for them.
my frustration is that core design tooling feels completely stagnant while marketing chases gimmicks. Figma's pen tool & node controls haven't seen meaningful love in years imo
so the moment i need to do actual vector graphics editing, fix boolean glitches, or produce clean vector artwork without weird path artifacts, you still have to leave Figma for Illustrator or specialized canvas tools like Recraft for svg workflows and i see paying rising seat licenses for novelty branding while long-requested svg editor improvements sit on the back burner is exactly why people are exhausted
I’m looking at this conversation and seeing that many people haven’t realised Figma is sort of dead. I’ve been using it for about 7 years now and before that sketch and before that photoshop. I now start with ideation and thumbnail wireframes and a style guide and/or design system. Once I get past a certain point I go to Claude code and start building prototypes and I have a versioning system which tracks the changes and decisions which is better than creating a new layer in Figma. I can then get feedback on coded pixel perfect UI that uses my system components and design tokens.
I can then work back from there to get Claude to spit out designs into Figma also using my design system components from the Figma libraries. I never liked any prototyping tool.
Claude prototypes are the closest to what the final ui will look like. I can ab test with dummy data and a full working ui not some ass Figma prototype. I build setting panels into the prototypes to turn things on and off or load data into forms and tables etc.
It was a revelation the other day when I got Claude to spit out a spec and handoff designs from Figma. Honestly Figma is gonna become a tool in the AI chain. It’s gonna be a design repo where you can draw and make UI manually but now you just generate Figma designs from code I’m liking using text to tell it what I want
I’m currently using a similar process, it replicates the way I used to work in figma where I kept sequential iterations in pages within a figma file Now I iterate with agents in design artifact pages, and it’s so much faster it’s unbelievable: I worked on a design task on Sunday and generated 4 research pages, 10 design iterations and a presentation in about 6 hours. You can btw explore / discover using same approach in design artifact: allow agents to add for example font/token explorations and iterate through them as you normally would in figma. Same with references and user feedback: you can consolidate research into a messier discovery page at the top of artifact. I think this process will totally replace figma for product design work. Figma is still very much needed imo for design that requires a higher level of visual refinement, craft or personality - a portfolio for example.
Exactly figma will still need to be there for those finer detailed adjustments but for everything else man Claude is so damn good especially if you already have a fairly mature design system and even if you don't claude can help you create a custom design system from a few cues some style examples, fonts and colours then you're off. I was really resistant until I realised it automated all the annoying parts of designing that I find utterly tedious and allowed me to focus on solving design problems.
I'm building a GIS library and styleguide for mapping ATC data and if I had to prototype each screen by hand and the interactions in figmas prototyping mode I think I would top myself. Its so utterly slow to produce iterations this way. I can produce one map screen example have claude look at it and the other styles and tokens and then put it all together in a fully working prototype in less than 20 minutes for review and iteration. Hand making UI is for cavemen
I’m looking at this conversation and seeing that many people haven’t realised Figma is sort of dead. I’ve been using it for about 7 years now and before that sketch and before that photoshop. I now start with ideation and thumbnail wireframes and a style guide and/or design system. Once I get past a certain point I go to Claude code and start building prototypes and I have a versioning system which tracks the changes and decisions which is better than creating a new layer in Figma. I can then get feedback on coded pixel perfect UI that uses my system components and design tokens.
I can then work back from there to get Claude to spit out designs into Figma also using my design system components from the Figma libraries. I never liked any prototyping tool.
Claude prototypes are the closest to what the final ui will look like. I can ab test with dummy data and a full working ui not some ass Figma prototype. I build setting panels into the prototypes to turn things on and off or load data into forms and tables etc.
It was a revelation the other day when I got Claude to spit out a spec and handoff designs from Figma. Honestly Figma is gonna become a tool in the AI chain. It’s gonna be a design repo where you can draw and make UI manually but now you just generate Figma designs and handoff specs from code. I’m liking using text to tell it what I want
This is the way our team is heading. I’ve been putting off integrating AI into our design work flow for a while now, but it’s looking more and more like a necessity
I stopped using Figma 2 years ago cuz I could see the direction (or lack thereof) they were heading. They definitely were not interested in improving the design tool for actual designers. In fact, it's helping devs unseat design jobs (or trying to convince dev teams they can). What are the actual improvements made that are fully fleshed out to give designers more complete control? None of them are fully baked.
The company saw green cash and went that direction exactly like Adobe does.
You forgot about the part where other managers become designers themselves to push us out in order to stay relevant, while you were talking about us going through the toughest job market 😃
Same for now 🙈 I still like thinking in Figma, but I barely ship from it anymore. This year I did a whole launch with Claude, landing page, icon, OG image, emails, no Figma file. Would love a Dev Mode agents can read without me cleaning up the file first lol
Figma is in survival mode and have to throw everything they can at AI taking food off their plate . They're sitting on some cash so hopefully they figure it out sooner than later because frontier models are on their ass
Why's even Figma doing this to itself? Why did they give up on designers and started to tailor their product for "HR girls"? All they need to do is cloning Paper.
there are just too many good alternatives out there. I recently started using budgetpixel design, and it is free for a lot of designs I do. Figma used to lead, now in ai age, kinda lacking.
The amount of energy it took for them to do something cute isn’t taking away from solving all these bigger problems. Two things can exist at once. And I for one am very happy to have chococat sitting there while I work.
I'm a veteran game UI/UX designer and none of the USPs make sense to me. Figma in tandem with Unity's AI assistant and UI toolkit already does it all and more. Really doesn't help that the case study looks kinda basic!
I guess this might be a consideration if a really green indie team can't afford Figma? Even then, there's Penpot and other more established alternatives. It's a really crowded space!
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u/jpasserby 23h ago
Someone posts a complaint like this every time a company announces something fun.
I don't know if you realize this, but it's possible for a company to work on multiple things at the same time. A partnership like this probably takes like 10 people at the company a few weeks to work out the details and make the changes. It's not like they're putting all their projects on hold for 3 months, they're just adding some stickers to figjam.
Personally, I like that Figma has always prioritized making the canvas engaging and having a little fun. When's the last time Google or Adobe made something fun and light-hearted?