My honest opinions on Figma Config 2024 Day 1

Bharat Apat
3 min readJun 27, 2024

First of all congratulations to the team for the timely release, it’s never easy to constantly keep pushing new features every year, specially this year where there could have been a lot of internal drama (Adobe merger for example)

1. Figma AI — the most awaited one!

🔴 My biggest concern — This year we will give corporate data to Open AI and next year we will give money and data to Open AI.

🟡 Addressing the blank canvas problem — I am not sure how it is better than using Mobbin. The design doesn’t seem reusable so it’s as good as a Jpeg.

🟢 Visual Search — This could be useful in extremely large orgs for people who work across different pods and for new joiners as well.

🟢 Writing — Yeah, definitely killed a lot of plugins there! Low hanging fruits.

🟡 Prototype — This was cool! But if it’s not accurate — then it will take more time to fix it than make it. There should be more control for this automation instead of it being a 1-click thing.

🟢 Layer Renaming — Pretty useful, but they should highlight a usecase for the problem of badly renamed layers (other than OCD). I hope it doesn’t F-up smart-animate.

Here’s the thing, I am anchored to when Adobe launched it’s AI features in Photoshop and Illustrator — it actually improved workflows. We are too far away from that.

I am also such a huge fan of Figma that I expected better story-telling for the features at Config! I wish the presentation was better TBH.

2. UI3 — The most optical change

🔴 Why? — I didn’t get the “why” part to be honest

🟡 Redo Tutorials — Time for content creators to make new tutorial series

3. Dev Mode — The true workflow enhancer

🟢 Code Connect — is the most impressive one, it’s finally out of beta.

🟢 New Status — Looks useful to me, good stuff!

4. Figma Slides — Got the most claps

🟡 I have mixed feelings — the product is great for design team (only)

🟡 But in a big org — who are the people who actually make the bulk of PPTs? Will they prefer this over their existing G-suite, MS-office?

🔴 If it’s not for the big orgs — is it for the small ones? Will people pay extra for this when they can do the same in Figma itself (with less elegance of-course).

Conclusion:

I had higher expectations. And I feel the audience in attendance had the same too, considering how many times speakers expected a clap and a cheer but got crickets.

These were just my initial thoughts, but I will share more on this once I use them.

Would love to know your initial thoughts.

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Bharat Apat

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