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Figma is one of the most popular design and prototype products for UX and UI designers. Introduced in 2016, Figma’s collaborative features, robust design and prototyping tools, and easy-to-use interface have made it a mainstay of the design industry.

Figma product’s cloud-based nature, real-time collaboration, and cross-platform accessibility make it a more powerful tool for team-based design workflows.

It is entirely web-based, which makes it essential to use it right in your browser without downloading or installing any software.

Figma is useful for:

Make static mockups and wireframes for websites and mobile applications.
Make interactive prototypes for mobile apps and websites.
Develop and oversee design systems that use reusable elements and styles.
Create infographics, social media postings, presentations, logos, and icons.
Helps to hold virtual workshops and facilitate group brainstorming sessions

through FigJam, Figma’s digital whiteboard tool.

In this designer blog, we’ll discuss the 5 Figma products that enabled every creator’s life for years.

What Are Figma Products?

Figma products are tools and features designed to facilitate design, collaboration, and development workflows.

These cloud-based products allow teams to work together in real time, creating designs, prototypes, and brainstorming documents.

They cater to various stages of the design process, from ideation to handoff, and are built to enhance productivity, collaboration, and efficiency across design and development teams.

By integrating different functionalities such as design creation, prototyping, and real-time collaboration, Figma provides a seamless experience for designers, developers, and other team members involved in product development.

Under Figma, the 5 main products involved are :

Figma Design
Fig Jam
Dev Mode
Figma Slides
Figma Plugins

Now, let’s better understand the products offered by Figma.

Figma Design:

Figma Design is a powerful Figma product that enables designers to create intricate and interactive designs for websites and apps without needing to code.

One of its standout features is the ability to create reusable components, which ensures that changes to an element will automatically update throughout the entire project, saving time and maintaining consistency.

This functionality is part of the design system that helps enforce uniformity across branding elements, typography, colors, and layout structures.

Figma’s vector editing capabilities give designers precise control over shapes, lines, and elements, allowing for detailed design work.

Additionally, Figma allows users to create interactive prototypes directly within the platform.

Designers can link various frames, add interactions, and set animations to create dynamic prototypes that showcase the flow and functionality of an app or website.

This makes Figma a comprehensive tool for design, from creation to final prototype, all without coding.

Download free Figma UI kits for your next project.

FigJam

FigJam is an online whiteboard tool by Figma to enhance collaboration and brainstorming in real-time.

It’s an ideal platform for meetings, workshops, and collaborative sessions, enabling teams to work together seamlessly from any location.

With FigJam, users can create sticky notes, use freehand drawing tools, and add other visual elements to quickly capture ideas and organize thoughts.

The real-time commenting, reactions, and discussion features allow team members to provide immediate feedback and adjust, fostering an environment of rapid iteration and creative exploration.

FigJam is particularly useful for brainstorming sessions, planning sprints, user flow mapping, and collaborative design discussions. It is an essential tool for teams looking to align ideas and iterate together efficiently.

Dev Mode

Dev Mode is a feature that streamlines the design-to-development handoff process. It bridges the gap between designers and developers, ensuring a smooth and efficient transition from design to code.

Dev Mode allows developers to inspect designs in detail, providing pixel-perfect measurements and access to properties like padding, shadows, font styles, and more.

This level of detail helps developers understand precisely how to implement elements by reducing the risk of errors.

Dev Mode also supports multiple resolutions for web and mobile applications, ensuring designs are accurately translated across different devices.

One of the unique features of Dev Mode is that designers can leave notes or comments within the tool, explaining design behavior and states, which helps developers understand the intended user experience more clearly.

Tracking updates and changes within the design ensures that designers and developers stay aligned with the most current version, making the process more efficient and collaborative.

Figma Slides

Figma Slides is a Figma product designed to help teams create and present compelling narratives in the form of slide decks.

It simplifies crafting professional, engaging presentations for internal reviews, client meetings, or investor pitches.

Teams can collaborate on the same slide deck in real time, ensuring that everyone’s input is incorporated and the presentation is always up-to-date.

Figma Slides allows users to add interactive elements, such as clickable prototypes, to help build excitement and demonstrate app or website functionality to potential clients or stakeholders.

The platform also integrates features like interactive polls and real-time audio and cursor chats, making it easier for teams to work together remotely and gather feedback.

Whether it’s for a product review, sales pitch, or feature highlight, Figma Slides helps designers and non-design collaborators craft visually appealing and persuasive presentations.

By supporting real-time collaboration, Figma Slides makes it easy for multiple team members or even clients to work together, offering a seamless and dynamic presentation experience.

Figma Plugins

Figma plugins are extensions that enhance the functionality of Figma, allowing users to customize their design process and integrate with other tools and services.

These plugins cover a wide range of tasks, such as automating repetitive actions, adding content like icons and images, improving accessibility, and streamlining workflows.

Popular Figma plugins include those for wireframing, creating illustrations, generating placeholder content, and syncing with third-party tools like Slack or Google Sheets.

With Figma’s open plugin ecosystem, users can either choose from a vast library of pre-made plugins or build their own to tailor the platform to their specific needs, improving productivity and efficiency in the design process.

Benefits of using Figma products

The reason why you need to implement Figma products is primarily due to the following reasons:

Real-time collaboration:

One of the biggest advantages of using Figma is the ability to collaborate in real time. Designers, developers, and stakeholders can work together simultaneously, regardless of their location.

This fosters immediate feedback, quicker iterations, and seamless teamwork, making aligning design decisions and tracking progress easier.

Cloud-based accessibility:

Since Figma is cloud-based, all project files are stored online, meaning team members can access them from anywhere, on any device, without worrying about software installation or version control issues.

This accessibility streamlines workflows, especially for distributed teams.

Streamlined Design-to-Development handoff:

Figma’s Dev Mode simplifies the transition from design to development.

Developers can inspect designs in detail, access measurements, view properties (e.g., font styles, padding, shadows), and get pixel-perfect accuracy, which reduces errors and ensures that designs are faithfully implemented in code.

Designers can also leave comments or clarifications for developers, ensuring alignment.

Design consistency:

With Figma’s component-based design system, teams can create reusable elements that maintain project consistency.

Any update to a component is automatically reflected in all instances across the design, ensuring uniformity in typography, colors, and layouts, which helps maintain brand consistency and reduces the risk of inconsistencies.

Interactive prototyping without code:

Figma enables designers to build interactive prototypes without writing a single line of code.

Designers can easily link frames, create interactions, and set animations to showcase app or website functionality. This speeds up the prototyping process and enables teams to test and validate design concepts faster.

Efficient brainstorming and ideation:

FigJam, Figma’s whiteboard tool, makes brainstorming sessions more effective by allowing teams to visually capture ideas, organize thoughts, and collaborate using sticky notes, freehand drawings, and other visual aids.

It also supports real-time discussions, helping teams stay aligned during workshops and planning sessions.

Although electronic engineering courses mainly focus on concepts like circuit design, signals, control systems, and electromagnetics, engineers are increasingly required to work with designers to create interactive, user-friendly design systems.

Bonus content: Figma Tools that stand out in 2024

Illustrations: Install this Creative Commons Licensed free plugin from the Figma community. It allows you to incorporate excellent illustrations into your projects.
ProtoPie: The Protopie plugin produces high-quality interactive prototypes that work and look like the actual product. You can advance your prototypes to the next level with dynamic interactions like variables, formulas, and conditions.
Pitchdeck Presentation Studio: Animations and real-time previews make it simple to create presentations on Figma. You can export presentations in various file formats, including Google Slides, Keynote, PowerPoint, etc.
Image Tracer: With the help of this plugin, you can now restyle your photographs, convert them to colorful vector layers, and create scaled graphics. This plugin helps in easy tracing.
Icons8: A curated set of more than 3 million icons, graphics, and images made by professional designers and artists, this plugin allows you to organize data by styles and categories.
Unsplash: Using the Unsplash license, you can use over 3 million free high-quality photographs that are ideal for your design.
Blush: Helping you to alter illustrations, Blush gives you a variety of mix-and-match design elements from artists’ collections and random compositions, thus producing original pictures that complement your brand’s look. You must pick a collection, select the composition, and drag it to the canvas to use it.
Smooth Shadow: Shadows always enhance the design. This plugin helps create a soft, layered shadow look.
Cassini: This is a collaborative tool kit. This makes various stages of the product development process smoother and more organized. The tool helps compare developed screens with the designs so that you can fix inconsistencies.

Explore our curated list of design tools and plugins like Figma UX plugins, Figma Color plugins or Figma AI plugins, which will help you in every step of your design workflow.

Conclusion

Figma’s suite of products has revolutionized the design and development process, offering a seamless blend of creativity, collaboration, and efficiency.

By enabling real-time collaboration, cloud-based accessibility, and a streamlined design-to-development handoff, Figma empowers teams to work together more effectively and produce high-quality designs faster.

Whether you’re creating static mockups, interactive prototypes, or facilitating brainstorming sessions through FigJam, Figma’s powerful tools support every stage of the design process.

Its intuitive interface, cloud-based nature, and comprehensive design system ensure consistency and alignment across teams, making it an essential tool for modern designers.

Frequently asked questions

What are the tools in Figma?

Figma offers a variety of tools designed to enhance the design process. Some of the key tools include:

Figma Design: A powerful tool for creating intricate, interactive designs and prototypes for websites and apps. It features reusable components, vector editing, and interactive prototyping.
FigJam: A digital whiteboard tool for real-time collaboration, brainstorming, and ideation. It allows teams to create sticky notes, freehand drawings, and visuals to organize ideas.
Dev Mode: A tool for simplifying the design-to-development handoff. Developers can inspect designs, view pixel-perfect measurements, and access design properties for accurate implementation.
Figma Slides: A tool for creating and presenting compelling slide decks with real-time collaboration, interactive prototypes, and presentation elements.
Plugins: Figma supports various plugins like Wireframe, ProtoPie, Icons8, and Unsplash, which extend its functionality and help streamline design workflows.

Which is better, Figma or Adobe?

The choice between Figma and Adobe tools like Adobe XD depends on specific needs:

Figma is highly regarded for its real-time collaboration, cloud-based accessibility, and seamless design-to-development handoff, making it ideal for team-based workflows and web/mobile interface design. It’s also browser-based, meaning no software installation is required.
Adobe tools like Adobe XD are well-suited for professionals who need advanced features and integration with other Adobe products. Adobe offers a more robust set of creative tools for graphic design, illustrations, and photo editing, making it suitable for broader design needs.

Figma is generally preferred for UI/UX design, collaboration, and prototyping, while Adobe excels in traditional graphic design and advanced image editing.

Both have their strengths, but Figma’s cloud-based, collaborative nature makes it the go-to tool for many modern design teams.

What is the best use of Figma products?

Figma products optimize the design process from ideation to handoff, enhancing collaboration and efficiency. Its design tools allow for interactive prototypes, mockups, and design systems across multiple platforms.

Real-time collaboration enables teams to give instant feedback and iterate quickly. Figma’s FigJam is excellent for brainstorming and workshops, while Dev Mode facilitates a smooth transition to development with precise specifications.

Additionally, Figma Slides helps create engaging presentations that incorporate interactive elements. Figma enhances productivity, consistency, and teamwork throughout the product development cycle.

Why Is It Vital To Use Figma Products?

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Betsy Thomas

Inspire the next generation of designers

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