Figma's new Chief Design Officer on AI empowering designers and reacting to Nano Banana Pro

teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. We have been keeping our next guest waiting for far too long. Uh, Lauren from Figma. Thank you so much from for holding.

Look at this. Look at this background. I couldn't even tell if it was I could just noticed that it was a TV, but it took

This is how they do it. A lot of the a lot of the professional TV hits on uh CNN and CNBC, people will be sitting right in front of a TV and they'll put uh some sort of fake background. It works very well.

Uh so great to have you on the show. Thanks for having me.

We we've been reacting to uh Nana Banana Pro this morning. Very very impressed on a bunch of different dimensions. But before we get into that, would love uh an introduction on yourself for the audience and and your background.

Yeah, of course. So I joined Figma two months ago as their chief design officer and before then I spent close to a decade at Meta primarily working on messaging. So I led the messenger and Instagram DM teams and more recently leading consumer AI on the product side. And um you know before you ask me I'll tell you why I joined Figma. Um, I did so because in my seat watching all of the um AI improvements that that we're seeing with these frontier models, it became very very clear that product development as a process is going to change drastically. And um I truly believe and I saw that Figma has the opportunity and I think the responsibility from my um point of view to really build the creative environment that helps people like me um people that really love to live at the intersection. Um I used to be a musician. I became a designer then a you know product leader. I really believe in the thing we're making more than like how different disciplines kind of like line up to to get the product done. And so I believe that a creative environment that helps you get that idea from your head into a finished product is what we need right now. And I'm excited to help Figma um build this.

Amazing. So so many different ways that you can integrate AI into Figma. You guys have been doing Figma make. There's also like the core product. What what's been your priorities kind of in the first couple months?

Yeah. So for everyone who doesn't know, Figma is the place in Figma where you could take your ideas or designs and prompt them into working software. And that's really important because it takes your design and like helps you understand what it looks like, what it feels like in motion. Um, and what we've been um looking into with this um is an aspect of AI that um I think gets overlooked sometimes. As a creative tool, it is important for AI not to box you in. Um, so you want to be able to take your design from Figma Figma design and um, generate it, but then you want to take those generations back to canvas and be able to like manipulate them as well. So, and we're moving pretty fast. In the last two months, I think we've shipped over 20 major features and a lot of them have to do with like putting the designer Yes. [laughter] putting the designer in the driver's seat and enabling the designer to take these AI tools but really wield them as tools that are precise and that go in their direction versus the number one most frustrating thing with generative AI right now is you generate an asset that's like 98% amazing and then there's like one tiny element and you try to like reprompt it and you try to say like could you remove that could you like try again on that you know with text yeah and then it's all changing and So just like make yeah making it making it easier to like go back go back and forth I think is like probably some of the most important work on the on the creative side.

Do you have a personal evaluation that you run when a new generative image uh model drops. I have this uh the where's Waldo test. I try and get it to generate a full Where's Waldo because that's there's a lot of detail in there. It's this whole laded up image. Um, do you have a favorite image that you go to as like your ground truth just to kind of get the flavor?

I don't necessarily. I have a [ __ ] ton of styles that I put it through the ringer with and a number of like creative tasks that I want to see if it does. What's really important with these images and um hasn't happened uh necessarily predictably so far is that they take that certain first scene that they generate or the photo that you give them and then they're dependable in recreating the style and telling the second part of the story. Otherwise, they're not helpful. An image that doesn't tell a story is not helpful.

This is why I like actually um Nano Banana Pro uh because it's dependable. Um the the way we um one of our companies um said today it's like it's it's a model that behaves. You should actually watch the the video that they've put out. It's hilarious and it's made in Weebi with with Gemini um 3.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Apparently I mean uh Prince here on on X is saying Nano Banana Pro is a reasoning image model and shares a quote. This enables enhanced image quality, better rendering of long text passages in many languages, improved factuality, which is something like we didn't like I was never thinking about the factualness of an image generator, but that's actually extremely important like you don't want errors.

Of course, is it realistic? Is it something that that really connects like our our eyes right like will pick up on details even before you understand what's going on and you'll understand that this is an AI generated image and the truth is that people prefer um to look at things that feel human that a human has put out there in the world and what's really cool with products like um Nano Banana Pro is that you're able to manipulate that and because it's your creative tool you could layer all of the different elements like as an example you know Dylan loves to post um videos with his like Figma quilt behind him.

Yeah. Yeah.

And so I took that I then generated the quilt um directly. Then I um turned it into a sweater and then I put it on, you know, one of Dylan's photos. And all in all of these steps, it kept um each square of the quilt exact. It did not distort Dylan's face. I could do what I what was in my head. versus in in other types of tools like this, this has not been possible yet.

What how how much do you care about like leveraging some of these models to help people generate new ideas? Because in in my in in uh my creative process is just like creativity often times is just like taking two different kind of like random disconnected ideas and bringing them together and sometimes it just hits. Uh and I feel like

creativity is messy. Yeah,

it's like bringing a lot of like disperate things into into the canvas in one way or another and letting them inspire you and like take the taking the next step with those. That's probably the biggest role of AI in the creative process right now is like how much can you explore because these tools exist. Um because in the end what you're trying to create is still the thing in your head.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Uh, have there been any internal uh memes that have been floating around in within Figma? Like uh I'm thinking of the Studio Giblly moment that was really big on the internet broadly, but have there been any uh like like just fun prompts? I I'm seeing people use Nanabanana Pro to make RPG style maps. Uh people are are using there's always like a new uh like fun prompt that kind of goes viral on the internet. I'm wondering if you have any glimmers of uh what might be the fun prompt from Nano Banana Pro based on what you've seen in uh in the internal team

chat.

I haven't seen any in the team chat outside of like just broad variations. So like none of them um really came up to the repeating like pattern so far, but insane variations like you know taking things that are just sketches and like filling them in with like complete 3D and like as designers really what we love to do is explore. So, we pushed this thing pretty hard.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm excited to get uh deeper into it. It's uh it's such a fun tool.

What's your

What's your updated read on just like general designer sentiment around AI? Because I feel like it it fluctuates from from fear to excitement and you have pockets where people are super excited and you have pockets where people are are kind of not excited about it or or calling it slop. But uh what is like the most upto-date read from your view specifically with like designers

relate to all of those points of view in some way right because if AI is just about speed and mass production of software and design like that is very anti what I'm here to put in the world.

Um but at the same time if design becomes a tool that you could actually control and it starts to inspire you as you you were saying that's [snorts] a very different thing. It really widens the canvas and this is why we're so interested in all of the new models and we put them through the ringer because we want to see how in the hands of designers these become clay that they could mold. And so I think it the the different opinions are just really at which point which part of it do you look do you look at the potential and what's you know kind of what's what's coming up and how it could work or do you look at exactly what it produced yesterday in which case a lot of times it is not great.

Yeah, makes a lot of sense.

Makes a lot of sense. I think David Chang was saying something about like you know good enough and you know producing just something good like we have this thing like at least at Figma we believe good enough is not good enough if [clears throat] all you know we're able to do in the future is create the same software a million times um that is just humanity losing.

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I I I process those two things very very differently. Um but yeah, I I I understand where you're coming from on that. Um

well, say more. I I I just I process uh just this idea of like I guess my question is like what is the mom and like what he was getting at was like what is the mom and pop restaurant that's not going to make an awards list that doesn't have the most viral turd duckan where it's

oh reliable. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's it's not it's not superlative. It's not the the world's heaviest donut, the world's like most you know gold flakes on a steak possible. Like it's not viral. It's not the best. Even just in terms of fine dining, it's not, oh, it has the 10 Michelin stars. It's the best, the best, the best. There's this demand for the superlative in the restaurant industry. And then there's also the demand for just the cheapest, fast, casual, just get in, get out. It's a complete commodity. And I understand what both of those are in the design world a little bit. I I mean I I feel like we've we've seen design trends uh you know like from Apple and you know where we've all been like wow like that is truly like the best UI possible

emotional connection

the absolute top and then we've also seen just like okay like that's just like the bootstrap design library that everyone uses for everything and that's like the the fast food of design and what's interesting is to think about that messy middle of design like what is the mom and pop shop for of design that's been there for decades that's reliable that's not you know it's not going viral and winning awards but it's good and you love it. I don't know it's a hard it's a hard I I don't know enough about enough design to like draw an analogy but maybe you can I don't know. Yeah, I think it's it's really use case dependent, right? In some way, like um you want a you know Tuesday night restaurant that is not all the bells and whistles and you want it to just deliver in some case and maybe that's your to-do app or where you keep your tasks for development, etc. Like there is no reason for design to kind of get in the way like in in um in those use cases. But then there's moments even in those flows where you want to feel something. You want to feel like that developer that thought about like the app had you in mind and those are really the the surprise moments, the delight moments that that make people be loyal to an app. [clears throat] Y

yeah I something something I've been thinking about is like what will be the product design equivalent of the mdash or or like when you when you read let's say somebody like publishes an essay and then you start reading it and you get to the second paragraph and you just like immediately close it because you realize like they just fully generated all the text. I feel like we're gonna start to get that with software more and more where you you'll go to a website or or an app and and from afar or at least when you first land on it, it looks like cool, this looks like a nice product and then you start using it and you realize like okay, like they generated a bunch of like nice animations and it like looks okay. But then the second that you actually start using it, you realize there was no real human thought put into the product. like it is now you can now make a product that looks like linear

in one prompt.

You cannot make a product that's going to feel like using linear. Uh

exactly.

And and so that's where that's where the human element is just going to continue to be super super powerful and that and that and and taking user feedback and like having that empathy with the user and being super thoughtful and using the using the products for yourself. Uh and not just uh because yeah, it's never been easier to create any type of application. Uh it still feels like just as hard in many ways to create like a product that's truly magical to daily drive or rely on.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. And I think AI will play a role into that. But actually to go back, I am so pissed about M dashes. [laughter]

Such a good tool. And every time I write now, I use them and I'm like whatever. People [laughter] are going to accuse me of of using AI.

Yeah, I think you just have to use the minus sign.

I do think

just kind of be recognizable

um when uh you know a website is just like kind of vi prompted vibe coded and put out there in the world and you're going to want to feel that um the developers spend more time considering that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Uh amazing. Well, thank you so much for for joining. Congratulations on the new role as uh as a Figma Figma DAU for going on

a decade now. I'm very very happy that you're on board.

Try out all the all the new toys.

Yeah, we will. Thanks for stopping by.

We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

Bye.

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