r/FigmaDesign

I‘m a graphic designer and am currently working my way through Figma‘s beginner course. My first impression is that it doesn’t really appear to be that difficult to learn. But I‘m probably completely underestimating the complexity of Figma.

So now I‘m wondering: How quickly can you get a general understanding of Figma as someone who already knows their way around other design programs like Indesign?

Thanks for your input! :)

I am designing a stapled booklet on Figma. The finished booklet will be A5 pages, but I have designed the booklet as A4 sheets, to be folded in the booklet. I went to the print shop, and their software couldn't handle the imposition, and told me I had to cut each A4 pieces into A5 pieces with the correct numbers. Is there an easy way to do this? My LLM is telling an insanely overcomplicated way of doing it. I just need to cut the A4 piece in half.

A new tool drops. "Generate your entire UI from a single prompt." Twitter goes wild. Figma stock dips. And designers and engineers everywhere collectively sigh.

Figma was never just a design tool. It's a collaboration infrastructure: The single source of truth where designers, developers, and product teams are always looking at the same thing. Specs live there. Handoff happens there. Design tokens, component libraries, annotations, all of it, in one place everyone can access.

>An AI can give you a starting point. It cannot be a source of truth.

A prompt-generated UI has no versioning, no component system, no shared context between a designer and a developer. It's a screenshot with good lighting. When the PM asks "what changed in v3?" or the dev needs the spacing token, that AI output has no answer.

These AI tools are genuinely useful, great for quick exploration, early ideation, client mood boards. But they solve for speed of first draft, not truth of final output. Those are completely different problems.

The market keeps punishing Figma for a competition that doesn't really exist yet. Until an AI tool can be the living, versioned, team-wide reference that a whole product org works from: Figma's actual job is untouched.

I never installed Figma and it just keeps reappearing on my desktop screen when I log in even when I delete it. I believe it might be from my high school but I never allowed my school to download anything on my computer so I just want to know how this is happening and how I can permanently delete it when I finish high school in June.

I was really excited about Kits because I thought it would improve how Figma Make connects to my design system. I expected that anything I create in Figma Make could be exported back into Figma—not just one frame at a time, but multiple frames together (which Figma Make currently doesn’t support).

More importantly, I expected those exported frames to stay connected to my design system—components, variables, color styles, font styles, etc. That way, when I hand designs off to developers, everything would already be properly linked with the correct tokens and naming.

But that’s not what happened. None of this seems to be solved by Kits.

Am I using it wrong? Have you had better results with Kits?

Apart from quick internal dashboard projects, portfolios, very basic landing pages you'd use for an SEO boost, or MVP apps you vibe-code on your own, has anyone actually found a real professional use for these products?

The more I test them, the more they all seem to produce very similar designs and layouts, like they're just cycling through a handful of premade templates.

You can honestly get better design ideas from Nano Banana Pro. So why is there so much hype around them?

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I recently saw demos of Claude generating full UI layouts and interactive prototypes directly from prompts.

https://aihutt.in/projects/a48ab56f-09d1-4b0e-bf42-46f5f720cb64

Curious what designers and developers actually think after trying it.

Been designing products for years. Got tired of rebuilding the same foundations every time, so I built Osnova UI — a professional design system I now ship to clients and decided to release publicly.

What makes it different from a typical UI kit:

Most kits give you flat screens you have to reverse-engineer. This is a living system — everything is wired together.

Foundations:

• Full color token system: primary, semantic, neutral

• Typography scale: Display · H1–H6 · Body · 5 weights (Regular → ExtraBold)

• Responsive grid: lg 1920 · md 1440 · sm 768 · xs 393

• Spacing, radius, layout primitives — all as Figma Variables

Components:

• Boolean toggles, instance swaps, dropdown variants

• Every component ships with: Type · State · Size · Color · Adornment · Nested instances

• No manual layer hunting — everything is surfaced through properties

Handoff:

Developers get one file with a clear, consistent structure. No drift between what the designer hands off and what gets built.

Free preview available in Figma with limited components — no purchase needed.

Happy to answer questions about token architecture, how variables are structured, or other questions.

I’d love to know to what extent people are using it. My feeling is that design operations, especially in larger organisations, are more resistant to it.

If you work for a company designing, rather than as a freelancer, how prominent is it actually in your organisation?

Personally, working in an agency, we’ve been focusing not on how we can leverage AI in our work, but instead focusing how we can make design outcomes more efficient through the use of more deterministic boilerplate design systems, atoms, section templates (now using slots).

We’ve managed to get building a whole website complete with bespoke branding using our design system (variables and components) to just a few days once we’ve ideated on concept and have a strong direction. In my mind, AI in workflows are at the end of the day about speed, so if we can achieve that in an environment that’s less prone to hallucination or to average design that’s a good thing.

How is everyone else handling/using AI? Is there a silent majority of designers who are plucking along BAU despite the these AI tools being available?

How can I create a simple image slideshow in a frame?

It's like one of those website banners where the end-upser swipes to see the next image.

My client asks me to create flyers to be posted on fb communties. Its out of scope from creating his website. How much should i charge him? He wants it in english and spanish.

Hey everyone!

I was wondering if anyone has used slots as a window to their UI template? If so, what was your handover like to your development team?

Im currently rebuilding a dashboard and I created a main component called "Template" that my team and I can use to speed up the process. From a design perspective its been great as it means we can just focus on filling the slot without repeating adding our navigation bar and header whilst adjusting the main frame in a grid.

However, when we hand it over to our Development Team the MCP generates everything when they just want whatever is in the slots.

Thanks!

On longer projects, I’ve noticed the why behind design decisions almost always lives in someone’s head, a Slack thread nobody can find, or a meeting that wasn’t recorded. The Figma file shows the final state — but the journey that got you there? Mostly gone.

A few situations that have personally frustrated me:

A PM joins mid-project and starts questioning a pattern we spent three sprints validating. A client asks “why didn’t you go with the simpler version?” and reconstructing that story on the fly always sounds defensive. A new designer joins and onboarding them to the reasoning behind decisions takes weeks of tribal knowledge transfer.

I’ve tried running Notion docs, a decisions page inside Figma with sticky notes, milestone slide decks. Nothing sticks the moment the project gets busy.

Curious what others do:

1. Do you document design rationale at all, or mostly after the fact?

2. Where does it live — and does your team actually read it?

3. Has a forgotten decision ever caused a real problem on your project?

4. If you’ve tried a system and abandoned it, what made it fall apart?

Curious if this genuinely bothers others or if it’s something I’ve convinced myself matters.

Not here to spam, just sharing something that might genuinely help.

I’ve got a pretty large collection of high-quality design assets — Figma, Framer, and Webflow templates across basically every use case. Portfolios (personal, photography, architecture), SaaS, fintech, edtech, landing pages, UI kits, full design systems, apps — the works.

The difference from the random free stuff you find online? These actually look and function like something a senior designer spent weeks on. Real components, real systems, not just pretty screenshots that fall apart when you start editing.

DM me what you’re building and I’ll tell you what I’ve got. Just here to help, not trying to sell anything.

I was talking with some friends about AI and design. Here is our thinking.

1. The Evolution of Design Systems

Companies like Leboncoin and Postman have laid off their DS teams to train their PMs and designers to generate code using Claude Code. The current trend is to refactor DSs so that they are machine-readable.

2. The Acceleration of AI

The accelerating pace of the industry is turning technology monitoring into a matter of career survival. Conversely, failing to “jump on the bandwagon” now could create an insurmountable gap, as mastering these tools is a “muscle” that needs to be developed today.

Personally, I prefer to wait until things settle down, until the market is a bit more stable and a tool really stands out.

3. The Transformation of Roles

The boundaries between Product Owner, Designer, and Developer are blurring. We will soon become generalist webmasters again.

Design could become as accessible as photography, where anyone can produce a result, making the barrier to entry more complex for professionals.

4. The Disparate Realities of the Market

The adoption of AI is not uniform and depends heavily on the sector: while startups are moving quickly, large companies are held back by technical constraints and very slow processes.

And you? Did you observe the same things?