In September 2022, Figma CEO and co-founder Dylan Field announced that the company had entered into an agreement to be acquired by Adobe for approximately USD $20 billion. Two or so months on from this announcement, UX/UI designers across the globe are settling into the evolution of Figma from an independent interface design tool to another application within Adobe’s wider Creative Cloud.
As Figma has always presented itself as a highly accessible and user-friendly alternative to Adobe XD, Adobe’s own interface design application, Figma users (or Figmates) are naturally questioning what changes Adobe may have in store for the future of the Figma platform and its signature features. But some industry professionals like Karl Graf, the Director at DreamWalk App Development, are feeling generally optimistic about Figma’s prospects under Adobe’s banner head.
“We welcome the integration of Figma with other Adobe products, says Graf “and hope this acquisition leads to more innovation and faster updates.”
Graf is not a lone voice here, with many other industry professionals across the globe citing that Adobe’s expansive funding and development resources are likely to improve Figma’s features and functionality, adding even more value to the popular web-based interface design application.
Today, we’ll be taking a closer look at the changes we can expect to see to the Figma platform over the coming months, and what will likely remain the same, as agreed upon by the leadership teams at both Figma and Adobe.
Integration with Adobe’s Creative Cloud
The most prominent change that can naturally be expected is Figma officially joining Adobe’s Creative Cloud Suite. Although the Figma computer application will be integrated into Adobe’s Creative Cloud library, executives at both Adobe and Figma have asserted that Figma will continue to provide software support for its web-based application to facilitate collaborative interface design functionalities.
Adobe’s executive vice president and chief business officer David Wadhwani, has asserted himself that ‘creativity [has become] increasingly collaborative’ and as a result, Figma’s features for collaboration will continue to be offered once the platform fully integrates into Adobe’s Creative Cloud Suite.
Wadhwani has also expressed that Figma’s ‘multiplayer platform’ is likely to be just as powerful an influence over Adobe’s Creative Cloud applications than the Creative Cloud will be on Figma itself. Adobe is excited to utilise the potential of collaborative features across the entirety of their Creative Cloud Suite, providing Adobe users with the same user-friendly features and user experience that propelled Figma to greater and greater heights since the platform’s initial launch in 2016.
Maintaining Figma’s superior performance
Despite being a low-cost or ‘freemium’ product for many UX/UI designers, and a completely free system for UX/UI students, the development team behind Figma still made consistent efforts to invest in the application’s performance. Thanks to the platform’s powerful 2D WebGL rendering engine, Figma users were able to enjoy a highly responsive user interface, with updates in collaborative design projects being provided in real-time. The immediacy and accuracy of mapping evolutions or edits to design projects is what set Figma apart from its competitors, including the ever-static Adobe XD.
As Figma’s superior performance is just as much a foundation of the application’s beloved user experience as Figma’s values itself, Figmates have been concerned about what the Adobe acquisition is likely to mean with regards to Figma’s continuous investments in its own development.
Thankfully, Figma CEO Dylan Field and his wider development team, seem adamant to maintain Figma’s exemplary product standards and strong industry reputation alongside fully utilising Adobe’s own technologies. This is precisely why Field referred to the acquisition as a ‘collaboration with Adobe’ in and of itself.
Simply put, it seems as though Figma’s performance is here to stay, and the platform’s impressive speed and heavy-duty rendering engine are being primed to adopt additional functionalities that will be provided by Adobe’s own design and development technologies.
Retaining Figma’s values and leadership team
On top of Figma being a highly user-friendly interface design application, the platform was also highly praised for its mission to maintain accessibility. Figma was founded on a passionate mission statement that consisted of two parts: first, to ‘eliminate the gap between imagination and reality’, and also to ensure that interface design tools stay accessible for students and budding UX/UI designers.
In order to keep these goals in mind over the future of Figma and its additional tech products and offerings, CEO Dylan Field asserted that Figma remain autonomous following the Adobe acquisition. Field and Wadhwani have both expressed that Adobe is equally committed to maintaining Figma as an autonomous entity despite being under Adobe’s umbrella. The benefits of maintaining Figma’s offices and development studios is that the platform can continue to work with Figma’s expansive global community, creating templates, plug-ins and widgets, and staying active on community forums to keep Figma’s collaborative culture alive.
Alongside retaining Figma’s founding values to be a ‘freemium’ interface design application and offer full platform access free of charge to schools and design students, Figma’s leadership team is also adamant that they will continue providing independently developed software support and application updates for Figma Design and FigJam, Figma’s interactive whiteboard application. Field also alluded to FigmaJam potentially becoming its own separate software offering outside of Figma Design in his announcement of Adobe’s acquisition.
Will Adobe XD be discontinued?
Of course, with Figma being integrated into Adobe’s Creative Cloud, both Figmates and Adobe users alike are wondering what the future holds for Adobe XD, Adobe’s own interface design application. Despite the fact that Adobe XD is still receiving system updates and will likely continue to be provided with software patches, it’s no secret that Adobe themselves have been aware of Adobe XD’s failures in comparison to the Figma platform.
An overwhelming majority of UX/UI design professionals simply prefer Figma’s ease of use and additional features for collaboration, two affordances that Adobe XD have consistently failed to meet as it isn’t a web-based application. As a result, it’s likely that Adobe XD will continue to be supported until its user base dwindles to a point where Adobe themselves deem maintaining the application to be unsustainable.
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Although Figma was able to build its strong reputation by being an independent platform, it’s likely that Figma’s leadership team have taken great strides in outlining the conditions of their acquisition by Adobe to ensure that the heart, soul, and creative spirit of Figma itself stays alive as the platform transitions into being a part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud. With these conditions in place and Figma’s original development team still occupying their own company HQ, it looks as though the future is bright for Figma and its global community.