I've been working on this piece for a few months, letting it simmer, watching the landscape shift, trying to decide whether it was worth publishing.
But after watching Config 2025, I knew it was time.
So, this isn’t just a critique. It’s some sort of a reckoning.

First, let me tell you how I got here.
I didn’t start in design. I started with my hands. With machines, bricks, chainsaws. I fixed engines. Welded steel. Cut glass. Dug trenches. Real-world stuff. Physical tools that served a purpose and stayed the hell out of the way. You learned the weight of the hammer, the bite of the blade. And once you did, you focused on the problem, not the damn tool.

And there are many like me. Designers who came up before Figma, before the blank canvas became infinite and the dropdowns got philosophical. People who solved hard, complicated problems with limited resources and a deep understanding of context. Today, many of them feel left behind. Pushed aside. Not because they lack skill, but because the culture has shifted to reward something else entirely.

The shapeshifting hammer.
Imagine this: every time you swing your hammer, its shape changes. The handle gets longer. The weight shifts. The head turns to rubber. Then back to steel. Then it flashes you a tooltip explaining how hammers work now.

Welcome to design in the Figma era.
We’ve built a cult around a tool that evolves faster than the problems it’s supposed to help us solve. Every update promises empowerment, speed, automation, and auto-layout nirvana. But something feels off. The tool that was meant to support our thinking now seems to think for us. Or worse, distract us from thinking altogether.

The illusion of freedom.
Figma handed everyone a blank canvas and said, "You’re a designer." On the surface, it sounds brilliant. Democratic. Uplifting. If I were 20 again, I’d probably be drunk on it.

But design isn’t about you. It never was. This isn’t therapy. It’s not a sandbox. You’re solving someone else’s problem, in someone else’s context, with someone else’s money. Your job is not to express yourself. Your job is to disappear behind a solution that actually works.

Instead, we got fireworks. Pretty interfaces. Endless animations. Products that move, dance and delight, but don’t actually solve anything. That’s not design. That’s performance art with a SaaS licence.

The value chain
Design doesn’t stop at the mock-up. It doesn’t even start there. The job is to understand what value looks like to a user. How it becomes a benefit. How that benefit gets sold. How it builds a brand. How it sustains a business.
That’s the job.

Not pushing pixels. Not fiddling with frames. Not memorising shortcut keys to impress the Slack channel.

We don’t need more feature drops. We need designers who can walk into a room with product, marketing, sales and engineering and hold the thread of why. We need translators of value, not stylists.

Prototyping is dead, long live theatre.
Prototyping used to be raw. Quick. A way to test bad ideas and let them fail fast and quietly. Figma turned it into a high-stakes stage play.

Now, you need a crash course just to prototype “properly.” Auto-layouts nested inside auto-layouts. Interactive components are layered deeply. Instead of thinking, you’re managing a machine. You can get a PhD in this.

This isn’t agility. It’s an addiction. To fidelity. To perfection. To the illusion of progress. And it’s costing us our sharpest tools: vision,  clarity.

Let’s talk about Dilution
The launch of Figma didn’t just change the tooling. It flooded the field. Platforms like Dribbble and Behance exploded with shiny, pixel-perfect designs that looked like real apps or websites, but had no connection to reality. No users. No problems. Just visual sugar with no substance.

It was nauseating. A strange talent show of fictional products. And it violated one of design’s core principles: don’t build something unless you have to. That’s why we prototype—to kill bad ideas before they waste everyone’s time.

Instead, we got a viral cycle of fake interfaces and design theatre. Everyone copying each other, polluting the internet with noise. Not just distracting—corrosive. It created the illusion that design is about looking good, not thinking well.

Now, a generation of young designers is waking up to the hangover. They can’t get jobs. They don’t understand internal process. They’ve never worked cross-functionally. Everything is reactive. They need a brief just to begin. And when the work fails, it turns into a debate—me vs. you—rather than a dialogue about value.

I’ve met these people. Talented. Passionate. But unequipped. No idea where the data comes from. No clue how the interface adapts in real use. No grasp of the system they're designing for. Just Figma skills and hope that pretty is enough.
It isn’t. And the market is saying so. Loudly.

A word about the cult of the canvas.
When Figma launched with a free infinite canvas and made powerful tools accessible to everyone, it was thrilling. Truly. We saw a surge of energy. A new wave of hungry, wide-eyed designers creating brilliant things for themselves, for early-stage teams, for scrappy organisations that had never had design support before. That energy mattered.

But that same openness distorted the supply and demand curve beyond recognition. Designers are venting online, asking why they’re being excluded from strategy and leadership. This is part of the answer. When the tool makes the job look easy, everyone thinks they can do it. And when everyone thinks they can do it, nobody thinks it’s worth paying for.

The growth dilemma.
Let me be clear. I understand the game. Figma operates in the same economic reality as the rest of us. Growth is king. Shareholders expect not just returns. But to leave expectations in a puddle of blood. Expansion isn’t optional. It’s survival. I can see why they need to keep launching, broadening, and stretching the edges of their market. Internally, I’m sure the roadmap makes perfect sense. It’s no longer a tool. It’s a platform. A suite. A layered product stack. Fine.

But here’s the problem: the people it was originally built for are being left behind. The role of the designer is not being elevated, it’s being degraded.
Not because designers have failed to grow, but because the tool has outpaced the context it was meant to serve. Figma scaled too fast, and now users are paying the price. Not in money, but in confidence. In clarity. In credibility within their own organisations.

A tool that makes it harder to practise design is not empowering anyone. It’s bloating the surface and hollowing out the core.

The pause.
I honestly don’t know what to make of all this.
Figma is no longer just a piece of software. It is a cultural force. A shape-shifter. An influencer of taste, method and mindset across the entire problem-solving domain. That makes it both powerful and risky. Because we are arriving at a very particular fork in the road.

We’re entering the age of hybrid intelligence. AI is not nibbling at the edges anymore, it’s moving straight into the middle. Interfaces are fading. Voice is rising. Search is moving from an engine to a companion.
Design is becoming adaptive, generative and context-aware. AI can now build an interface on demand, tailored to a user’s needs, without ever requiring a human designer. Soon, the job won’t be diluted. It will be completley transformed, maybe even gone.

If we do not actively protect and re-centre the thinking side of design, framing problems, understanding context, making decisions, then the visible side will be automated out of relevance. The next flood won’t be junior designers.
It will be machines.

This is the moment. Either we reclaim design as a strategic craft, or we lose it to automation, permanently. What do I mean by that, well, that's for another post.

This last part is for you @Figma.
If this sounds harsh, it’s because it matters. You’ve built something remarkable. A generation of designers found their footing on your canvas.
But that loyalty doesn’t scale forever.

The happiness of your shareholders will be short-lived if the people using your platform no longer need to exist. The internal excitement and the fanbase euphoria at Config 2025 might feel like momentum, but it’s not support. Not for those of us trying to solve real problems with real teams in real environments.

The visual internet itself is under threat. Voice is rising. POC Agents show up more an more. Interfaces are dissolving. Generative systems are already bypassing human-crafted layouts in favour of on-demand, adaptive outputs.
If design becomes invisible, so does your platform.

You’re in a position to shape the future of this craft, maybe even protect it.
If you keep designing for applause, and not for relevance, you’ll be left with the loudest stage and no one left to stand on it.

Love,
A.