Design Better · The Curiosity Department, sponsored by Wix Studio

Noah Levin: AMA with Figma's VP of Design on their latest releases

·1 hr 4 min·5 clips

Noah Levin shares how Figma sent an engineer to watch his team work, signaling their deep commitment to community feedback.

1. Design Better hosts Eli Woolery and Aaron Walter interview Noah Levin, VP of Design at Figma, in a live AMA following Config 2024. 2. Levin has been at Figma for nearly eight years, joining around late 2017 to help grow the design team from four people — himself, Peter, Chris, and Rasmus — to a large organization. 3. The episode's central thesis is that Figma is evolving from a single design tool into a multi-product 'creative operating system' that covers every phase from brainstorming to publishing. 4. Levin introduces the four Config 2024 new products: Figma Make (AI prompt-to-design), Figma Draw (expressive illustration), Figma Sites (publish directly from Figma), and Figma Buzz (marketing asset generation). 5. He frames Figma's company DNA as community-led — distinct from Apple (marketing-centric) and Google (engineering-centric), where he worked for two years — illustrating this with the story of CEO Dylan Field flying an engineer to New York in 2016 to watch Levin's team at ClassPass use an early Figma prototype. 6. Figma Make's most recent update, 'style context,' lets designers publish a Figma library so AI-generated designs match their company's existing brand styles; Levin acknowledges component-level matching is not yet available. 7. Levin demonstrates Figma Sites via somethings.fyi, a personal site he built over several months cataloguing his favorite objects, software, and TV shows — revealing it publicly for the first time during this AMA. 8. The somethings.fyi site uses standard Figma components, auto layout, grid, parallax scrolling, and an Easter egg toggle between regular screenshots and AI-generated isometric 3D versions of each product. 9. He also demos a portfolio site built to replace the now-sunset read.cv, using Figma's Code Layers feature to add custom cursor animations and 3D hover effects via natural-language prompts without writing code. 10. Levin mentions using Figma Buzz for his wife Vita's baby shower — bulk-creating icebreaker cards from a spreadsheet she filled in without needing to know Figma — and announces they are expecting their first child. 11. On the career question submitted by community member Liz, Levin advises early-career designers to focus on being helpful rather than checking off a skills list, and to stop being protective about ideas — 'nothing great is made alone.' 12. He references Figma's open-sourced career ladder published in FigJam as a concrete resource for designers evaluating career progression. 13. On AI and designer career fears, Levin argues the proliferation of AI-generated software actually raises the value of design: in an attention economy, users only want a few meaningful experiences, so design quality becomes the differentiator. 14. He encourages designers to approach AI with curiosity and play rather than treating it as a foreign threat, and suggests that 'prompting things into existence' lets teams explore more of the 'idea maze' faster. 15. FigJam originated from observing users making sticky-note components and holding meetings inside Figma — a tool not built for that purpose — showing that user behavior often signals what products to build next. 16. Dev Mode was built after Figma found that approximately one-third of its entire user base were developers, not designers — a data point that drove the decision to build explicitly for that role. 17. Figma Slides followed a similar pattern: users were building slides in Figma before a slides product existed, which signaled the need. 18. The episode uses a live AMA format; Levin shares his screen throughout, showing actual Figma files, personal projects, and product demos in real time, giving the conversation a practical, behind-the-scenes feel. 19. Product designers, design leaders, and Figma power users who want a practitioner's first-person look at Figma's 2024 product direction will find this episode directly useful. 20. Listeners seeking independent analysis of Figma's competitive position, or who are not Figma users, may find the episode too product-focused.

As heard by us

A practical Figma release walkthrough for teams watching AI, prototyping, and designer-developer collaboration.

Figma's Config releases get a practical, inside-the-room treatment from Noah Levin, the company's VP of Design. The conversation moves through new tools and audience questions about design teams in the AI era, designer-developer collaboration, and where Figma may be headed next.

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Why you'd press play

You get a front-row look at Figma's recent Config releases, with the questions designers are asking.

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