Dear Figma Friends,

We need to talk about content.

It’s at the core of almost every digital product and experience.

Designers working in Figma have fantastic tools to create mockups and prototypes; explore visual, interface, and interaction design ideas; and structure their design intentions in ways that can help developers carry proposals into production.

Content, however, is a second-class citizen in the world of Figma. Where are the tools for inspecting content changes over time? For marking screens as “content-ready”?

I’m concerned that as bad as the relationship between Figma designs and content have been, the addition of LLM tools to fill in realistic-seeming content is going to make this situation worse for a lot of teams.

How will anyone being handed a design to review be able to tell if the content has actually been considered, planned, aligned to the voice/tone/guidance for product or marketing, or if it’s been conveniently mocked up using a generation prompt or drag and drop infill?

Making things look like the real thing has drawbacks. It makes things look “done” and “ready” even when they are not.

I know I know—no tool is ever going to replace the need for people to communicate and have conversations with one another. There are more engineers than content folks, and most teams don’t have specialized content designers.

But your vision is to “make design accessible to everyone.” And you believe “the best way to design is together.”

Your tools need a first-class content experience. More importantly, the industry counts on you as its leading design tool provider to set a tone in what you build into your product for what digital products in general should prioritize.

I would love to see Figma take content as seriously as the rest of us, and start showing us a vision for how Figma can help content and design work together.

Your friendly neighborhood design teacher,
Nevan