Figma is the Online, Collaborative Design Tool UI Designers have been waiting for
Over the past 10 months, the team has been busy developing the tool, which gives designers and people who work closely with designers the opportunity to work together on a design in real time.
Figma is different than other workflow management tools like Spaces from file-sharing site Hightail and Wake—two programs that also allow designers to work collaboratively in teams—because Figma is at its core a vector editing tool.
In that way, users can design directly in the software, rather than relying on importing solely from programs like Adobe Illustrator and Sketch (though it can do that, too).
Yet unlike Adobe Illustrator, arguably its most direct competitor, Figma is browser-based and connects to the cloud, allowing for multiple designers to work on the same project simultaneously.
It's this multiplayer functionality that makes Figma a truly collaborative design editing program. In its current version, Figma essentially does for graphics what Google Docs does for text.
Achieving multiplayer functionality also means that the Figma team can eventually create a community aspect to the tool—offering to interface designers an open-source community similar to the open-source coding site Github. "Everything is moving to a collaborative online space, but design tools still haven’t changed," Field says.