Hi there 👋

Today, everyone’s talking about the announcements made at the latest edition of Figma’s annual conference, Config 2024. The discourse varies from excitement to despair, from adoration to disgust, but one thing no one seems to be questioning is the importance of the updates and how big an impact the changes will have.

If you need a quick overview of everything announced, here’s a link to Figma’s official recap post. Social media are already full of summaries, reactions, and rants about each and every one of these features.

I’m not going to jump on that train but instead want to share a few reflections made with a wider lens. I can’t deny I’m writing in a bit of an emotional rush. It won’t be the best-edited piece I’ve ever published, but at least it’s raw and it’s honest.

Commoditization of design

Are designers going to dig their own graves? Recklessly helping to train models that will soon replace them? To a certain extent, this is already happening. I think that at this point it’s no longer a discussion of whether designers will lose their jobs to AI but how many of them will.

I don’t want this to be yet another bittersweet dump of wishful thinking. You’ve likely already heard it all:

• AI is not real intelligence, it’s statistics

• Statistics cannot be creative

• AI won’t replace designers because it can’t be creative in ways humans can

• If you leverage your human creativity and strategic thinking, you won’t lose your job

But the truth is we don’t know. Give me another article or a LinkedIn post of a self-proclaimed expert speculating about the future of AI and I might start losing my sh*t. The reality is that we simply don’t know. The progress in the field is fast and non-linear. The next big leap might be tomorrow or five years from now. Let’s stop hunting black swans and focus on what’s happening today.

And what we do know today is that design is getting commoditized. It’s a wider industry shift with AI being only a part of it. Design systems, standardization, data-driven processes, AB testing, and others also play an important role.

Figma’s influence on that process goes much further than its latest announcements. It all started with live cursors and PMs wandering around your design files uninvited, watching you draw your little boxes. Blurring the lines between designing and whiteboarding, creating “a design tool for everyone” took this idea further. Incorporating AI into it was merely a logical next step.

Everyone is a designer

This approach makes perfect sense for Figma as they try to cast a wider net and increase revenue. But for designers, it means complex ramifications, often happening behind their backs. It poses important questions for teams and companies of all sizes: