Wanna be a digital MacGyver? Here’s why Figma is the Swiss army knife you need

This article is for you even if you’re not a designer. ESPECIALLY if you’re not a designer.

For a long time, I thought that graphic tools were not for me. Even today, I’m not comfortable with Photoshop. I tried several times to get into it but I find the tool rather unpleasant to use, not really intuitive. Then I discovered Figma and I suddenly realized that I was quite capable of doing graphic design. But not only! Little by little, I discovered that Figma allowed me to do many other things and I fell in love with this versatile tool.

Now, I love Figma so much that I’m talking everyone’s ear off with it, I get overexcited about every new feature, and recently I even started giving Figma training to teach the world how to use this wonderful tool. At this point, I think it’s worth mentioning that I don’t work for Figma and they don’t pay me to write these lines.

Nothing great is made alone

So, what is Figma? Initially, it’s a digital tool, designed for designers, by designers. It is often presented as a solution for creating mockups of digital products: websites, applications, software… You can create screens, interactive prototypes and test them as if they were the final product. And Figma does this very well.

If you already know a little bit about this kind of tool, you will tell me that Sketch also does it very well, and that’s true. If we stay on the surface, Sketch and Figma are two very good interface design tools.

But if we dig a little deeper, we can see that Figma goes much further in that it is entirely focused on collaboration. In fact, the motto of the company is “Nothing great is made alone” and that perfectly reflects their positioning: Figma is designed to facilitate collaboration, communication and teamwork. The team behind Figma has understood the power of collective intelligence and does everything possible to foster it.

Indeed, the latest features presented are almost all in this direction:

• Ability to converse in audio with teammates while collaborating on the same file
• Advanced sharing options
• A new workflow call Branching, that enables people to work on several versions of the same file and then merge them while avoiding conflicts (like versioning for developers)
• The limit of users increased to 500 people, able to collaborate on the same file at the same time (100 editors + 400 viewers max)
• Development of the Figma community with the ability for anyone to share resources

“Nothing great is made alone” and Figma definitely wants to help us achieve great things.

A tool for everyone

And this opening does not stop there. Figma is aimed at a much wider audience. Yes, it’s a wonderful tool for designers, but it can also be useful to students, teachers, communication and marketing teams, community managers, facilitators, artists…

With Figma, you can

• Create presentation slides and present them directly in the tool
• Make vector drawings, illustrations
• Create mind maps and moodboards
• Do graphic design and layout, for presentations, business cards, CVs, flyers…
• Prepare content for social media, as you would on Canvas
• Or find even more unexpected uses:

→ Create games such as a boardgame, a digital escape room or even a video game

→ Organise collective remote activities like inception events

→ Create personalized avatars

→ Visualize dynamic interior design plans

Two sides of the same coin

When I started to think about writing this article, I was also using Figma as a whiteboard, to host brainstorming, creativity or decision-making workshops. I could have added these uses in the previous list but then, the Figma team launched Figjam.

Figjam is a perfectly executed digital whiteboard with cool and smart features. You’ll argue that Miro or Mural already provide similar solutions, and you’ll be right. But you’ve got to see the big picture here: Figjam is not only a whiteboard, it is also the perfect complementary tool that Figma needed to hit the next level in terms of communication, idea sharing and collective intelligence.

In short, we could say that Figjam and Figma are two sides of the same coin, allowing us to think, explore and create together.

Despite all of that, Figma is not a magic wand. It’s a Swiss Army knife. A versatile, adaptable, robust and flexible tool that turns you into a digital MacGyver as you explore its possibilities.

In other words, I’m not saying that Figma will magically solve all the problems we are struggling with. But Figma might be the tool that will help us face them by finding solutions together.