Figma Rolls Out AI Tools to Rival Design Giants like Adobe, Canva
Collaborative design platform Figma has introduced Figma AI, a suite of AI-powered features to enhance designers’ creativity and productivity. These tools claim to remove creative blocks and streamline design processes, making it easier for users to find inspiration, automate tedious tasks, and bring their best ideas to life. Additionally, the company has introduced a revamped user interface, referred to as UI3. These new features in Figma AI and UI3 are in limited beta, available through 2024, for free. However, usage limits might be implemented based on user feedback and costs. The updates follow Adobe’s failed 20 billion dollar acquisition of Figma due to antitrust scrutiny last year. Now, taking matters into its own hands, the company is reinventing itself with AI. With AI products in the pipeline and a redesigned interface, Figma is gearing up to compete with major players like Adobe and Canva. “We’re gonna eat the cost for 2024 because we don’t know how people are going to use the features yet. We don’t know how many of you will care, we don’t know how good they get,” Figma CEO and co-founder Dylan Field said in a recent interview. Productivity Tools New productivity features like AI-powered text tools for translating, shortening, or rewriting text, generating realistic copy and images, and removing image backgrounds. The background removal features are powered by AI marketing company Jasper’s new model. “As an applied AI company built by and for marketers, we care deeply about pushing the boundaries of generative AI research to deliver powerful multimodal solutions to our customers,” said Timothy Young, Jasper’s chief executive officer. “This is a great example of a global organisation leveraging our proprietary models to power innovative image editing solutions at scale to improve outputs for their customers.” Additionally, it has introduced quick-click prototyping, enabling users to rapidly turn static mocks into interactive prototypes to simplify the process of bringing designs to life and securing stakeholder buy-in. New Search Capabilities The company has introduced new features like ‘Visual Search’ and AI-driven ‘Asset Search’ to help designers quickly find the necessary components. Visual Search allows users to find and reuse designs by uploading images, selecting areas on the canvas, or entering text queries. This feature will eventually extend to Figma’s community files. Asset Search improves existing functionality by understanding the semantic meaning and context behind search queries, making it easier to find relevant components even if the search terms don’t exactly match the asset names. This enhancement reduces the time spent searching for specific assets, streamlining the design process. Automatic Layer Renaming According to Figma, the AI-powered ‘Rename Layers’ feature can save designers hours of monotonous work by automatically renaming layers with contextual titles, keeping files organised and developer-ready. Design Generation from Text Prompts Another new feature, the ‘Make Designs’ in the Actions panel allows users to generate UI layouts and component options from text prompts. This capability helps designers overcome the blank canvas problem by providing a starting point for new projects and speeding up the workflow. Privacy and Data Protection The company claims to be committed to protecting user privacy and data as all the customer data is encrypted at rest and in transit, with strict access controls. AI models are trained using de-identified content, and participation in AI content training is optional. Admins can also control content-sharing settings, with different default settings for various plans. Figma says that usage data, distinct from customer content, is used in an aggregated, de-identified manner to protect privacy. Figma will start training on this content from August 15th. Starter and Professional plans are opted in by default, while Organisation and Enterprise plans are opted out.
The updates follow Adobe’s failed 20 billion dollar acquisition of Figma due to antitrust scrutiny last year.
The updates follow Adobe's failed 20 billion dollar acquisition of Figma due to antitrust scrutiny last year. 
["Canva"]
["Go", "API", "TPU", "AI", "ML", "Canva", "RAG", "Aim", "generative AI", "Rust", "R"]
["AI", "ML", "generative AI", "Aim", "RAG", "TPU", "R", "Go", "Rust", "API"]
Shritama (she/her) is a technology journalist at AIM who is passionate to explore generative AI with a special focus on big techs, database, healthcare, DE&amp;I, hiring in tech and more.