Dylan Field: Is AI Replacing Designers?, Design is the New Code & Democratizing Creativity

The conversation takes place in Napa, California, on the sidelines of an event where Figma CEO Dylan Field had spoken about how product development is changing. He sums up his view in a line he admits people would expect from him: as AI coding models improve, design becomes the main thing that sets products apart.

design is the new code

Field adds a qualification. He does not say engineers are becoming unnecessary: "we definitely need engineers at Figma, we love our engineers." His claim is that programming itself is changing, and that as it changes, "the value is rising in terms of differentiation to the top, right? That's design." He puts brand, marketing's point of view, being bold, and the emotional reaction a product can draw out in that same top layer. He says "a lot of people are missing that." He offers no data or examples in this section to back the claim.

Field says Figma started in August 2012. He describes its mission as making it so "the best, best teams in the world can design and create and build the world's best software." He says the product is also used for marketing, advertising, slides, whiteboarding and diagramming. In his account, people use it for nearly any visual work, even when it wasn't built for that.

Asked whether "design software" is a fair label, Field says design is the company's "center" and "core." He says that in product reviews the team talks about designers and what they want. He also notes that the word has "like a hundred definitions," and it can mean interior, industrial, product or brand design. His own preferred definition is tentative:

maybe creativity meets problem solving

Before moving to the Adobe deal, the interviewer describes their own background in graphic design. They say they have used Photoshop since 1990, before it had layers. They got an original Macintosh in 1984 and did design work as a kid for neighbors and small businesses. They also used early 3D tools like Bryce, and say Kai's Power Tools "reinvented Adobe Photoshop" for them.

Field's view of Photoshop is mixed. He calls it "very mature and maybe beyond mature," with many parts added over the years. He sees this as a common pattern: software "gets more bloated over time if you're not careful." He still credits Adobe as "very inventive" and says he has respected the company since he was a kid. He calls it an "intergenerational incredible company" that helped drive the graphic design revolution.

The interviewer recalls that Adobe offered to buy Figma for $20 billion, about 10 or 11 years after the company was founded. Field explains why Figma said yes: it felt like a moment when Figma "could join and not be totally absorbed." He worried that if Figma were smaller, "maybe we would just kind of dissipate." After the agreement was signed, regulators objected and the deal was blocked. Field says calling it "antitrust" oversimplifies things. He names the United States, the European Union and the CMA as the authorities involved.

Field says he still does not think the deal was anti-competitive. He admits many people online saw it differently, "at least they did back then." He thought the regulators' arguments were poor:

Fighting past battles not looking at the future and what this all would become.

He also says he is not criticizing the outcome out of regret. He is "stoked to be independent," and points out that under Adobe the plan was simply to keep running Figma.

Field's main complaint is about the process. Figma went through 16 months of regulatory review, which he says "definitely needs to be fixed somehow." He argues that a review that long could be "very destructive" for one or both companies in a real anti-competitive case. His example is Amazon's planned acquisition of Roomba. In his telling, regulators wanted to punish Amazon and blocked it, after which Roomba went bankrupt and the market "basically went To China." This is Field's own description, and he calls it a tangent. From that, he concludes that pursuing ideals "doesn't always practically like help America."

16 months of regulatory review for any company is punishing