Figma co-founder Dylan Field appears to be a big Enron fan — or rather, of the company's crypto-powered semi-parodic relaunch that hit the Internet earlier this week.
Wearing an oversized Enron hoodie while speaking with WIRED editor Steven Levy at the Big Interview event in San Francisco on Tuesday, Field said he has always been a fan of the Enron logo, the last one created by the legendary American graphic designer Paul Rand of the ABC, IBM, UPS and Westinghouse logos. But he said he also “got a real kick” from the potential relaunch of Enron, which is linked to “Birds Aren't Real” creator Connor Gaydos. As someone who was just nine years old when Enron imploded in 2001, Field says he wonders (optimistically, it seems) whether it's possible to build a new company on the back of the tainted brand , given that his generation may not have the kind of baggage related to the company's stumbles that others do.
Either way, it seems like it's a matter of the power of design, something Field and Levy focused on more broadly as their conversation progressed, not only talking about the creation and evolution of the Figma platform, but also about where the co-founder sees the company. going in the near future.
Currently, Field says, the company has “millions” of users, a third of whom come from the design world, a third from programming and a third from various other backgrounds. With Figma, he believes, brands and businesses can express themselves visually much better than ever before, working together to more quickly understand what is graphically possible, what is the best user experience and how to best differentiate themselves in the marketplace.
But at a time when AI has the potential to make most things look at least relatively good, Levy wondered: How can companies using Figma differentiate themselves? Field says the answer isn't just lowering the floor to meet aspiring designers and programmers, something that kind of AI work has already done, but “raising the ceiling” to help pretty good designers and programmers work beyond the previous limits of their skills. .
The best designers, Field says, have a unique ability to manipulate interactivity, dynamics, motion and UX to create work that few others can match. With AI tools like the ones Figma has or will integrate, he hopes more people will be “more limited by their ideas than by the tools in front of them,” ideally giving them the opportunity to explore the work of some of the best designers in the world to match. the world.
While Field acknowledged the possibility that good design can help bad actors, citing a particularly well-designed magazine that ISIS released around 2014 or 2015 as an extreme use case, he says that all tools have the power to elevate people if they are made correctly.
“Most AI tools today are about lowering the floor,” Field reiterated. “They want to make sure that democratization happens, and that's great in many ways. For example, you talk to people who are doing image generation with distribution models, and some of them are doing art therapy, which was never possible before.” Still, he added that it is important to raise the ceiling. “That's what a lot of our thinking is focused on right now, and that's what I hope we can work towards.”
