Figma Community: the Github for designers
An appreciation piece on how well-modelled the Figma Community feature is and how it can possibly change the way the world designs digitally
What is Figma Community?
Community is a recently released feature on Figma that lets you explore, install, use and remix thousands of plugins and files published by designers and developers. Think of it as a public place where people can publish live design files — much analogous to what Github does in the development domain.
The feature was announced last year, and has now begun to roll out to all users, starting Aug 2020. I’ve been checking it out over the last few weeks and must say, I’m impressed. Searching for inspirational design systems, icon packs, wireframes, illustrations, and plugins have never been this easy. And the best part? All of this is tightly knit with your existing design workflow, nullifying the entry barrier to any designer using Figma.
How is it any different than Dribbble or Behance?
Design processes have changed a lot over the years. While designers have become more open and welcoming to non-designers, tools like Figma have revolutionised the way we collaborate online.
Designing on the cloud has kind of become the norm now. Hence the tight integration of a community with the design tool of your choice becomes all the more important. This is exactly where the Figma Community comes in. Its amazing integration capabilities let you explore what other designers are up to while helping you save time & effort by curating pre-made resources and templates. The Community has been envisioned to be a supplement rather than a replacement for portfolio sites like Behance or Dribbble - the idea is for users to share files and show the design process like layers and vector paths that make up a piece of work.
Strong architecture with top players onboarded
The way it is built, I believe Figma Community has the potential to become the open-source standard for design projects in the public space. Most of the major design-first companies of the world including Airtable, Atlassian, Dropbox, Facebook, GitLab, Google, Microsoft, Slack, Twitter and Uber already have their active presence on the Community.
Figma has always topped the game with it’s web based multi-player approach in a totally crowded space with huge competition from Sketch, Adobe, Invision etc.
A Github for designers
Github has recently reinvented itself from a mere open-source code repository to a community where developers share, shape, and collaborate on code. And Figma has introduced the Community feature at the right time for building a similar open-source community for interface designers.
“Designers are at the center of the organization: on any given day they might find themselves sharing assets with another designer, adjusting copy for marketing or making redlines for an engineer. While engineers have built all sorts of tools which make it easy for them to work as a team, designers are still in the dark ages when it comes to collaborative workflows.”
— Dylan Field, CEO & Co-founder, Figma
So it becomes all the more important for designers to be able to share, modify, and build on their work as the role of design evolves from an after-thought to a key aspect of product development lifecycle.
Here are a few notable features of the Community that I think has the potential to help it evolve into a collaborative knowledge space for designers. And that can definitely evangelize design in the same way Github evangelized code.
A web-based public-facing profile
Just like how the Github profile page tells people the story of your work through the repositories you’re interested in, the contributions you’ve made, and the conversations you’ve had, Figma Community’s Creator profile now helps individual designers set up their own profile page to present their designs and intra-organisation pages so that peer learning is encouraged.
At the same time, it also acts as the go-to place for organisations and teams to share their design systems and philosophies online.
A better opportunity to remix, inspect and learn
While designers love to present their work in style, they also have a strong desire to inspect and learn from the work of other designers. With the Figma Community you can now discover a Figma file and use it for your own personal projects by just duplicating it. Very similar to how you fork a repository on Github and develop on top of that.
Also, with Figma, you get an opportunity to beautifully present the story of your design. In contrary to just a static image being shared on the social media, the Community lets you share live design files that others can inspect, remix and learn from.
An easy way to discover interest based projects
Figma Community lets you follow your favourite Creators and get a curated feed with all your interest based projects while giving equal prominence to exploring other trending and noteworthy projects as well.
They have collections from a wide spectrum of domains including design systems, wireframes, illustrations, icons, typography, mobile design, web design, UI kits and more.
The Community aspect elevates Figma from just being a design tool to a platform and a culture centered around collaborative design. A culture that is based on the values of work-sharing, mutual help, cross-domain benefits, and open-source contributions. As more creators are onboarded, the Community can become a place where professionals and aspiring designers alike can easily discover new ideas and learn from the brands & people they admire via the simple act of sharing a Figma file.
P.S: Although the explore feature is in public beta and is accessible to all, the creator access is available to customers on the organization plan first. However, designers can sign-up to the creator beta requesting an access to share their own resources.
