Designing the Future: A Conversation with Dylan Field

So I'm really delighted to welcome Dylan Field

to The Big Interview stage.

He's the co-founder and CEO of Figma.

As a student of Brown University,

he and his co-founder Evan Wallace began experimenting

with design tools built on and for the web,

and with funding from a Teal fellowship,

maybe we'll talk about that, they began Figma.

His previous jobs were internships,

including at LinkedIn.

Figma has millions of users,

they run a big developer conference called Config,

and lightly they've been very creative in integrating

AI into their product.

Like you had a choice, right?

And welcome Dylan Field.

[audience applauding]

Steven, WIRED, Thank you for having me.

And also really great to be back here at Config,

our first Config,

which was just weeks before the pandemic,

was actually here at the Midway.

And so it's very exciting to be back and good energy.

Well, great to have you back, though.

I have to say, I've got a comment on what you're wearing.

You are the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company.

Why are you wearing an Enron hoodie?

All right, well, first of all,

one thing that people don't know enough of is

that the Enron logo was designed by Paul Rand,

which I'm sure some of us know.

Paul Rand was an amazing brand designer responsible

for many different corporate entities,

including IBM, the NeXT Cube,

and his last one actually was the Enron logo,

and it was the final project he worked on.

It was released after his death.

And you might say it had a short shelf life.

It went from what I think actually is a quite timeless logo

to being called the crooked E.

And one thing that happened yesterday,

which I thought I got a real kick out of,

was somebody actually acquired the right to the Enron brand,

and they did a relaunch on the anniversary

of the bankruptcy.

And to me, I kind of think this is fascinating

because it brings up all sorts of questions

for a new generation

that didn't necessarily have all the associations

with Enron as others did,

can you actually make a new brand,

a new company out of that material?

And for me, I was,

I think it was 2001 when Enron went bankrupt.

I was nine years old, I was reading the newspaper

aware that there's like really bad stuff happening,

aware that there are brownouts,

but I definitely don't have those same associations

as a lot of others do.

And I find the whole thing very fascinating.

So that's why I'm wearing the sweatshirt.

So in other words,

you're not getting the negative implications,

of which there are some of Enron,

but it's just like a kind of a cool gangster thing,

that aspect of it.

Attached to a logo which you bonded to there,

is this always an appreciation of that stuff you had,

because you were in college,

you were doing math and science.

Then you get this fellowship

that basically tells people get out of college,

build something.

And you gravitate towards design.

Is this something you were always interested in,

or would you just see that as a gap, an opportunity?

Yeah, I was always interested in design.

Not always very good at design

because are two different things,

your taste versus your ability.

There's a lot of good famous quotes about that.

But for me, I mean,

I was always fascinated with how things worked,

the user experience of things,

and also graphics and how you actually could use interfaces

online and the web as well as desktop software.

I grew up playing things like Incredible Tune Machine,

then eventually things like Neopets

were big influences for me in my childhood.

And the design aspects of those

and how they worked were endlessly fascinating.

But yeah, it took a while to get to Figma.

I started the company because my co-founder

and I were excited about WebGL.

And we thought that that was definitely an opportunity,

the ability to use the GPU in your computer in the browser.

And if we could start to do that, what could you make?

We thought there's really two things

that could be interesting.

One is games and the other might be tools.

And we thought, okay, games is a hit-based business

that is incredibly hard to do the right way.

We're not gonna go there.

Instead we said, Let's go explore the space of tools.

And we started to explore,

I'd actually just been a design intern at Flipboard,

and they had an incredible design team there,

and were really ahead of their time in terms

of the premium they put on design.

They thought about design as part of something

that everyone in the company contributed to

and was the reason that they stood out as a business.

And despite that, it still took a while for us

to get back to design because we thought

it was a tiny market.

And it turned out that the more we learned about it,

the more we looked into it,

we started to realize

that this was an exponential trend of not only

how much software is created in the world,

but also the importance of design in that context.

And that design was the way that you stand out.

And what's interesting now

I think in this age of AI

that we find ourselves in is that it feels like

that's even more true than ever.

Both the exponential trend of software,

I mean it's going straight vertical now,

but also this idea that craft of design being the way

that companies will stand out in this age of software,

I think is more important than it's ever been too.

And also the ratios, I think that when we started Figma,

the ratio of designers to engineers

were sort of off the charts.

And that was much better than it had been 10 years prior.

And we started to see improvements in those ratios

even over the first five years of Figma.

I think if you look to the future,

it might be that the ratio flips even,

that there's more people

that are doing things that look like design

than people that are actually building the code.

And so I'm fascinated to see

what that'll look like in the future.

Well, one of the pillars of Figma is

there's this paradigm of collaboration in design.

Now Paul Rand, who you idolize,

he didn't have to collaborate with anyone.

When Steve Jobs tried to stick his nose in

to the process when he was doing the NeXT design,

he said, Get out of here.

He said, It's either take it or leave it.

If you don't like it,

I'll take my $100,000 and go home.

Did you have trouble pitching that

to generations of designers who are used

to that kind of data attitude?

Yeah, absolutely.

There's I think this mindset that agencies had

where it was sort of,

there's a grand reveal and a black box

that the process is in.

And when we launched Figma,

I remember the comments were something like,

If this is the future of design, I'm changing careers.

That was one comment we got.

Another comment that always stuck with me was,

A camel is a horse designed by committee.

And what we've found is

because design is so central to how a business works,

and also if you win or lose,

not only does everyone have an opinion,

and you could say, the more opinions, the worse it gets.

But I actually find that if you're able to make it so

that everyone can come together and see the best ideas

and you can visualize them quickly,

which I think will become more possible in the age of AI,

then you're able to kind of create a level playing field.

And maybe for brand and marks

like Paul Rand created

where you have to really be so strongly opinionated,

that's a different sort of beast altogether.

But when it comes to thinking through user flows,

thinking through how a product experience should work

and how a business should win,

oftentimes that really helps the strategy.

So what you said before

links to something else that you've said,

because creativity is the new productivity, right?

Can you explain that?

My sense is that people are trying

to visually express themselves much more than before.

And also that there's a new paradigm possible

when you've got an infinite visual canvas.

And with an infinite visual canvas,

whether it's in a whiteboard tool,

we offer something called FigJam, or even in a slide deck,

and we have Figma Slides now too,

being able to show great visual work

can really help bring people along.

And I think that the more creative you can be,

the more you can stand out,

whether it's inside of an organization

or it's on the outside of an organization

and in your marketing, your product,

the ways that you'll stand out to customers.

So if millions of people are using Figma,

which they are, right?

You're not telling me how many millions,

but it's fair to say millions,

then if everything looks good, then how do you stand out?

Isn't you raising the bar

making it actually tougher to be distinct?

Yeah, I think that it's not just about how it looks,

but also how it works, of course.

But I believe that there's things

that the best designers are doing today

in terms of interactivity, dynamism, motion,

and just unique experiences that they're creating,

which very few people are able to do.

But I hope that we can do two things.

I hope that we can, partially with our tools,

but also partially with AI,

and really they're the same thing.

We can lower the floor,

make it so that more people can participate

in the process of design, but also raise the ceiling,

make it so that more people,

whether they're new to design

or outside the world of design

or they wouldn't classify themselves that way,

or they're new designers can raise the ceiling

on their work.

And they can make it so that they're able to match the work

of some of the best designers in the world.

And they're limited more by their ideas

than by the tools in front of them.

So Dylan, the first time we spoke,

I know we had a great meeting

and went out for coffee

and you were telling me how

I'm never gonna sell out this company,

we're gonna go it alone, we're gonna like build on that.

And it was like maybe two months later,

Adobe is gonna buy your company for $20 billion.

I felt so bad when I told you that.

I felt like,

if you've ever had a one-on-one conversation with Steven,

you'll know how he stares into your soul.

And I had just gotten off a call

with Adobe literally minutes before.

What a poker player. Unbelievable.

No no no. I was petrified.

I was like, did he hear? Anyway, I'm still sorry.

Okay, well don't drop the subject.

[Dylan] Just feel bad, that's all.

I mean was this the kind of thing

where you felt it's an offer I can't refuse?

Or is it something you felt,

gee, this is generally gonna be better for my customers

and to grow what we want to do?

Yeah, I was honestly quite excited.

I think it was something that to me,

especially as we explored it further,

and that was still early in the process.

And so I think we're going back and forth,

but I was excited about the possibilities

we could have inside of Adobe.

What we could do there in terms

of taking the multiplayer tech,

the way that we brought our product to the web

and doing that for more of the Adobe ecosystem

and the change we could create there.

And I thought it was a good outcome,

not only for our customers,

which honestly most negotiation was about

how to make sure our customers would end up in a great place

and be beneficial for them,

but also for all the stakeholders around the company.

So yeah, I was excited and that's why we went after it.

And obviously because regulators here and abroad

said they were not gonna look kindly on this,

that went fizzle.

And you're left with a company on your own again,

you have an extra billion dollars

for a breakup fee.

But I'm sure you had your plans

and it was a distraction,

but then you get to concentrate on AI there.

So walk me through a little bit of your journey

about how you're building, you know,

it's available now in open betas and things,

AI into what you do.

Absolutely, so yeah,

we're wildly excited about just all the opportunities ahead.

And I think that as we think about the future

of Figma and what it can become,

I mean we started off as a design tool where

a third of our users, weekly active users are designers,

third are developers,

and third are kind of in the other category.

And we found these folks were coming into the product

and then we started to build out from there.

We created FigJam, we created Figma Slides, now Dev Mode.

And we're really trying to make this platform

where you can go and create products and do that end to end.

And as I think about what AI enables through that,

I get excited about these different transitions

between abstractions.

How can you go from a brainstorm file to a slide deck,

or a slide deck to a design file,

a design file to working code?

That becomes more possible in a world of AI,

but also the ability to improve

the way that you explore this idea maze.

We're all kind of in the design process

thinking about all these different possibilities

that could exist.

How do you go rapidly navigate that?

Think about the things that could be, evaluate them quickly,

and then see if you wanna go down that path

and really refine it and bring all the craft to it,

or if you can discard that possibility.

And if you could do that across that entire process quickly

and bring those two things together, it's super powerful.

And that's where I think you can,

I guess both lower the floor but also raise the ceiling

and make it so that in the sort of end state,

even though there's so much more software in the world,

the software we have that stands out can be so much better.

It seems to me, the way I understand,

and correct me if I'm wrong,

there's sort of two paths that you're pursuing on AI.

One is just to improve the flow,

to use AI the way some of us will use ChatGPT

to fill in things and automate certain kinds of things

and just like make...

And it's all once search through things you already have,

just things that make it go smoother

and take drudgery away.

The second is almost to build a collaborator

to the creative process.

And that's where things get interesting

and a little questionable.

Like where did this stuff come from?

And you had one experience,

you had a product that

maybe you could explain it briefly,

but I mean, I don't know have we time to really get into it,

ultimately someone used something

that wound up looking a lot like Apple's weather app

and you had to make an adjustment.

So rather than dive into that,

there is this gray area of whether people should contribute

to the training sets.

You're transparent about that,

but some people wanna do that.

They want to contribute to the community.

Other people are very protective. There's lawsuits.

So where you stand on that?

Do you feel that we're gonna be a blend of the creativity

that comes from this cloud

of what comes from training sets and us,

or will people draw firmer lines as this goes along?

So it's interesting

because when we launched this Make Design feature,

which we later called First Draft

because we thought that was more representative

of the actual value that we were creating,

this is the first draft that you're gonna iterate on,

we did it in a way that was more generic.

And what we found in the feedback we received

was actually design companies have a design system already.

They have a system that they rely on

of a kit of parts of all their styles,

their components that they want to use.

So they don't want an arbitrary thing.

And what they do want from us

is the ability to quickly explore

and make variations using their own design system.

So I think first of all, most likely,

a lot of those outputs on the generative side

are more unique to companies and organizations

than they are matching the general universe of design.

But it is important to be able to do all sorts

of other functionality as well.

And I think where training comes in is making it

so that we're able to explore that.

Things like if you're in Gmail for example,

and you start typing and you see auto-suggested text

and you can press Tab to complete it,

like what's the design tool equivalent of that?

What makes it so that you can remove drudgery,

the things that people don't want to do,

and put people into more of a flow state,

make them more creative

and make it so that they can explore

even more options faster?

If we can do that, then that I think is really exciting.

Yeah, that's great.

But I guess my fear is

you're doing great work in democratizing design,

so you add AI to the mix,

there's people who are gonna

like raise the floor to do that, to make things look good.

But we've already seen what good enough does in ChatGPT

and we're inundated with AI slop,

and I guess it's sort of my nightmare

that this stuff looks better and draws us in even more.

Yeah, I think that it's interesting,

when I look back at the history of Figma,

there was a moment where, I don't know, 2014, 2015,

where I realized some of the negative effects

of the power of design.

I remember later in the night

reading about the time ISIS was

a really important challenge

that we were facing globally.

And there was a magazine they put out

which was really horrific

and it was incredibly well-designed.

And designed as a power to lift

bad actors as well as, that's extreme case obviously,

as well as stuff that maybe just be like not as interesting.

And I think that that is the reality

of all tools is they have the power

if they're made correctly to lift people up.

And that's a debate that you can have

I think about any tool.

But what I think is most important is

that we find ways to recognize that most

of the AI tools right now are about lowering the floor.

They're about making it so that there's democratization.

Democratization is great in many ways

and new use cases and markets aren't locked.

You talk to the people that do image generation

with diffusion models, not all of them are doing the things

that you expect.

Some of them are doing like art therapy,

which is never possible before.

But I also think it's so critical for us

to really invest in, like I said,

raising the ceiling and making these new possibilities

for designers.

And that's where a lot of our thinking is right now.

And that's where I hope we can drive towards.

I'd love to go on, that's a great place to stop.

Thank you, Dylan. Thank you.

[audience applauding]