When Figma Starts Designing Us

However, over the course of the last five years, I’ve grown increasingly worried about what Figma is doing to the field of design by pushing designers toward an engineering-centric way of working. This can be seen in their feature releases: Smart Components, Variables, Auto Layout, and Interactive Prototypes. These features are often celebrated as steps toward parity with engineering, but in practice, they encourage a mode of working that narrows the field of possibility at precisely the moment when it should be expanding.

As an engineer, I agree wholeheartedly with this. The design systems nerd in me absolutely loves these engineering-focused features in Figma. But if we go too far down this road, designers will bring less and less creative value to teams over time.