As the digital design landscape evolves, tools that help designers overcome creative blocks and streamline their workflow become increasingly valuable. Figma, a leader in collaborative design tools, has taken a significant leap forward by introducing a suite of AI-powered features aimed at enhancing creativity and efficiency. In this detailed review, we’ll explore Figma’s latest innovations, designed to help you bring your best ideas to life.

Join the Beta: Get Ahead with Figma AI

Figma AI and UI3 are currently in limited beta, with a gradual rollout planned. You can join the beta directly from within Figma by navigating to the bottom of the screen, clicking on the "?" icon, and selecting "Join UI3 + AI waitlist." For more information, check out the Help Center.

Figma AI: Enhancing Creativity and Efficiency

Since integrating AI features into FigJam, Figma has focused on harnessing AI’s power to solve real user problems. Figma AI is a collection of features designed to help you work more efficiently and creatively, whether you’re seeking inspiration, exploring multiple directions, or automating tedious tasks.

Find exactly what you need with enhanced search

Finding specific designs or components in a large design system can be challenging. To solve this, Figma has introduced Visual Search and AI-enhanced Asset Search.

Visual Search allows users to find designs by uploading an image, selecting an area on the canvas, or entering a text query. This feature surfaces similar designs from team files, making it easy to insert relevant frames. Future updates will extend this to community files, simplifying resource discovery.

The intuitive nature of Visual Search is impressive. Users can upload an image and instantly find the needed design or new inspiration. Future enhancements will allow searches of community files within the editor, with proper attribution to the original creator.

Figma has also upgraded its Asset Search functionality. This uses AI to understand the meaning behind search queries, returning relevant components even if the search terms don’t match their names. For example, searching for “primary button” will surface relevant button components, even if named differently in the design system. This intuitive search simplifies finding and using components.

Say goodbye to racking your brain for exact asset names. Asset search intuitively finds what you’re looking for.

Work more efficiently and stay in the flow

Figma is also introducing a set of tools to streamline common design tasks and enhance efficiency. These tools cover everything from image editing and generation to interactive prototyping and even layer naming.

Translate, shorten, or rewrite text in a click

Make it stand Figma introduces AI-powered text tools that make it easier to iterate on copy and find the right words. These tools allow you to translate, shorten, or rewrite text with a click, helping you automate busywork and explore high-fidelity ideas faster

Bring designs to life with realistic copy and images

Figma is also introducing a set of tools to streamline common design tasks and enhance efficiency, covering everything from image editing and generation to interactive prototyping and even layer naming.

One of the standout features is the AI-powered content generation tool, which helps designers quickly populate their designs with realistic text and images. While lorem ipsum and FPO placeholders are common, using realistic content can create more engaging and persuasive mockups that better communicate the design vision.

Additionally, the new tools include the ability to remove image backgrounds directly on the canvas. This allows designers to instantly isolate subjects and create striking visuals without needing to switch to different tools.

Move from design to reality faster with quick-click prototyping

By clicking "Make Prototype," you can rapidly turn static mocks into interactive prototypes, making it simpler to bring ideas to life and get stakeholder buy-in. You can preview prototypes directly on the canvas, streamlining iteration and perfecting designs more efficiently.

Stay organized with automatic layer renaming

"Rename Layers" is a seemingly small feature that can save designers hours of monotonous work over the course of a project. It helps keep your files organized and developer-ready.

Generate designs from text prompts

The blank canvas problem is a common challenge when starting a new Figma file without a clear direction. The "Make Designs" feature in the Actions panel addresses this by generating UI layouts and component options based on your text prompts. Simply describe what you need, and the feature will provide a first draft, helping you quickly get ideas down and explore different design directions. This allows you to arrive at a solution faster and with greater ease.

Data privacy and protection

Figma’s model development process is designed with privacy at its core. All customer data is encrypted both at rest and in transit, and robust security measures are in place to protect against unauthorized access. Additionally, tailored permissions and user access controls ensure that only authorized individuals can view and access your data.

To train their AI models, Figma focuses on general design patterns and Figma-specific concepts rather than individual user content. They go the extra mile by de-identifying and redacting sensitive information from text and images, maintaining the confidentiality of your content while enhancing their AI capabilities.

AI Model training

It's noteworthy that Figma is introducing a team-level setting allowing admins to control whether customer content is shared with Figma for AI training. This includes file content created or uploaded to Figma, such as layer names, properties, text, images, comments, and annotations. Sharing this content for AI training is optional, and team preferences will be applied starting August 15, 2024. If an admin opts out after this date, new content and edits will not be used for AI training.

Admins can set their content data training preferences starting today, with the following default settings:

Starter and Professional plans: Opted in by default, but can be opted out.
Organization and Enterprise plans: Opted out by default, due to their more complex agreements.

Content training will not begin until August 15, giving teams time to adjust their settings. Notably, any content generated by Figma AI is considered customer content data, and you retain rights to outputs generated using Figma AI.

Regarding usage data, it differs from customer content and includes technical logs, metadata, and information about how Figma is used. This data is aggregated and de-identified to protect privacy and is not considered part of your content.

Figma also clarifies its approach to Community files. Free files in the Figma Community are available under licenses that permit transformation but require attribution. However, until a clear approach is established, generative models will not be trained on Community files. So far, public, free Community files have only been used to enhance search features, and no training has been done on paid Community files.