Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge
Believe it or not, Dylan Field tells me over Zoom this week, when he started Figma he was only thinking about one thing: making cool design tools. In was 2012, and Field and co-founder Evan Wallace had the idea of building design software for the web browser — making the design process live, interactive, and collaborative — in ways it hadn’t really been in software before.
The idea was much easier to imagine than it was to build. Figma was building in stealth mode for three years before its first public preview, but the hard technical work paid off. Figma was a hit with designers almost immediately, as the real-time collaboration it enabled made design processes — particularly software design processes — much more efficient than they had…
