Figma spent years in stealth earlier than launching its web-based collaborative design tool. Since coming into the sunshine, the corporate has been iterating shortly. Today, Figma launches its largest product replace so far.
Meet FigJam, Figma’s new whiteboarding tool.
The total idea of Figma stemmed from the truth that designers have been taking on rather more area on the figurative desk, and wanted a place to collaborate effectively. That is barely extra true at the moment, particularly over the last yr of working from house, which is why Figma is extending itself all through the workflow of designers with whiteboarding.
Not solely does FigJam give designers a place to provide you with concepts collectively, however it additionally offers non-designers a place to take part within the brainstorm.
FigJam performance consists of sticky notes, emojis and drawing instruments, in addition to shapes, pre-built traces and connectors, stamps and cursor chats. As anticipated, FigJam works with Figma so parts or different design objects breathed into life on FigJam can simply be moved into Figma.
“Our point of view here was focusing on how to make FigJam work as the first step in the design process, before you go into actually doing design work,” stated Figma founder and CEO Dylan Field. “We see people looking for a better, more fluid experience, but we also wanted to make it simple enough to bring other people into the tool.”
To take that a step additional, Figma can be introducing voice chat into all of its merchandise. That means customers who’re designing alongside each other in Figma or brainstorming in Figjam don’t must hop into a separate Zoom name or Google Meet, however can simply toggle on chat in Figma to make use of audio.
Figma didn’t construct its voice chat from scratch, however slightly labored with a companion to convey this to market. Figma didn’t specify which companion/tech it’s working with on voice chat.
Alongside the discharge of Figjam and voice chat, Figma can be releasing a extra full-featured cell app, which can be in beta as a Testflight at launch.
Image Credits: Figma
One last replace that Figma is asserting at the moment is branching and merging in Figma. This permits designers who’re updating the design system, for instance, to department out and do their work after which merge that work with the prevailing design system, slightly than updating a shared element or useful resource and affecting everybody else’s workflow.