Figma announced lots of new things last week during config. There is a massive redesign, new features on dev mode, updates on AI, and a brand new product they're launching. There is a lot to catch up on, so in this video, I'll give you a quick recap on the most important things. Hi, I'm Debra, your product co-worker, and I share my journey working as a product lead and product designer.
If you're new here and you're interested about config, make sure to stick around, because next week I'll be reviewing my experience at the conference and letting you know if I think it's worth the investment. With that said, let's get started. So the first category we'll be covering is UI3, or the redesign of Figma as we know.
Figma has redesigned their user interface to enhance the experience. At a glance, you can think, oh. They brought rounded corners, but I promise there is more to it. You get to control your control bars that are on the sides, reducing or expanding them.
And you're gonna notice that the 2 bar that was at the top is now in the bottom. But let me explain why this redesign is happening. When Figma launched over 10 years ago, The interface looked like this, which is quite similar to what we have today. The goal of this redesign is not to simply give the product's look a refresh, but to deal with the complexity that built up as new features were introduced.
So according to Figma, the goal is for us to be able to focus on our work and not be distracted by all of those features that we can use. Also, they reorganize a couple of things so that features that are commonly used in the same context are closer together. But overall, the locations are going to be pretty much the same, so you don't have to learn everything from scratch. In the description, I'm sharing a link from a talk with the designers that led this redesign, explaining their process and the challenges that they faced. I found it super interesting and I think you're gonna like it too.
Know that Figma will roll out this incrementally, so not everyone is going to be seeing this at first. There will also be a time where you'll be able to go back and forth on the new UI and the old UI. So you're going to have time to learn for a very smooth transition. If you don't have access to it just now, you can sign up to the waitlist. I left a link with the step-by-step for this in the description.
Also, a new feature that they're bringing is suggested auto layout. For those who are just getting started with auto layout and in a way for you to fast track this process so you don't have to create nested layers over and over again. The second category is Dev Mode.
As you may already know, Figma is trying to bridge this gap between design and code. Dev Mode now has new statuses like completed or edited, so it's clear whatever was changed on the designs. So developers can be in the same page when new changes or when something is ready for them to start building. The second category, which is one that we are all expecting them to bring, is AI. AI.
So Figma is continuing to build new features that include AI in the design process. They are launching specific functionalities that are going to help you in three main stages. Getting started, find what you need, and staying in the flow. For you to get started, the new AI feature is going to receive a prompt from you, and it's going to generate a first design for you to start working with.
To find what you need, AI is going to help you finding or also generating assets, which can save you a lot of time. And lastly, staying in the flow. So it's going to create text and images. It's going to translate the text to different languages.
It's going to prototype things for you, which at the moment, it's a very manual and obnoxious thing to do. And lastly, it's going to rename layers. I feel super excited about the features to stay in the flow because staying on the flow usually requires a lot of manual and repetitive work. So it's really nice that AI is going to be helping us out.
And lastly, we got to talk about this new product that Figma is launching, Figma slides, or as we all wanted to call it, slides. As designers or product managers, we are often assigned to create presentations. whether we're talking about a pitch deck to present to a stakeholder, or we're talking about that presentation that is going to be used for a general team meeting.
Until now, creating a presentation on Figma was literally a pain because it is not a presentation tool with this new product. We now have the new home of our presentations, which lives in the same place of the designs that we're doing on a daily basis. So we have the main functionalities that we see on presentation tools like Google Slides and PowerPoint, features like speaker notes, animations, simple rearrangement of slides, but powered with native design features from Figma that we love and use, such as alignment tools, seeming, and also the ability to use the slides.
tweaking vectors, and even importing full prototypes from our Figma design files. With that, we no longer need to create some of the assets on Figma, export, take elsewhere. You can now do literally everything on Figma slides.
My favorite thing is that it encompasses this. those design functionalities that we love and use while bringing those presentation features that we missed so much. This is good for designers because we can go ahead and easily make those tweaks to the design of the presentation, but also we can bring other team members who are often not very familiar with Figma functionalities to the presentation so we can work together and collaborate, each person having their special view based on the role that they play.
I'm leaving the intro tutorial to this product in the description so you can have a look. Thank you for watching this video. I hope you feel excited and confident to try these new updates.
If you enjoyed this video, make sure to check out this one where I share my preparation to AthenConfig 2024. See you next time. Happy designing!