What Designers Need to Know About AI

Config 2024 Figma AI Updates & The Future of Design

AI isn’t replacing designers, it’s expanding our capabilities.

It’s Tuesday conscious designers! 🤙 Today we are continuing with our series on AI. 🤖

The second I posted about AI on Linkedin it did reaaaaaally well. A handful of designers asked me for last week’s article on AI. If you missed it, sign up now for access. All this to say, there is a clear hunger to know more about AI. As a designers, it’s our job to lead the way. If there’s one thing you take away from this, it’s that we do NOT need to be scared of AI. 🛑 Shhhhh, breathe. 🧘🏻‍♀️

Understanding AI Basics

Last week we covered the AI basics:

✔️ What it is

✔️ The history of AI

✔️ Common terminology

✔️ Courses to learn more

If you need a refresher, start here: Your Comprehensive Guide to the AI Landscape.

AI in Design

If you don’t use AI in your workflow, you will get left behind. Don’t get me wrong, you can absolutely do your work without AI, I mean…we have been right? The thing is, AI can:

✔️ Give you leverage,

✔️ Expand your capabilities, and

✔️ Save you time (and therefore 🤑).

What’s more is it is becoming an integrated part of design tools workflow meaning employers are going to EXPECT YOU to know how to leverage AI. We’ll talk about how this applies to Figma below. ⬇️ I need you to release your attachment to any “way of working” and stay open to new tools and processes. Don’t worry, we’ll talk all about how to incorporate new ideas.

Designers can apply AI at basically every point of their workflow. For example, in UX research, ideation, prototyping, and even designing. Does that mean we should? No, not necessarily. We need to think critically about where it actually makes sense. Don’t be the robot, be the master. 😉

Personally I like AI for:

• Expanding my thought limitations

• Automating “lazy” tasks (e.g. figma layers)

• Data amalgamation or analysis

• Visualizing an idea

• Brainstorming and ideation

(In our next articles, we’ll talk about tools and concerns.)

How do you use AI? Lmk in the comments or email me here: seratajima@substack.com.

Figma AI Features

I am a Product Designer, which is why here I’ll focus on the tech industries tool of choice: Figma. Config (the largest digital design conference in the world) happened last week and with it came a handful of new AI capabilities.✨

Search with a visual

This is going to be powerful. Search for anything from icons to entire design files with a screenshot, a selected frame, or even a simple sketch with the pencil tool. Figma will show you similar designs from team files you have access to.

Sample use cases:

• Get inspired through related designs and see how others are thinking about a design problem

• Browse through past explorations to help finish an in-progress design

• Find the latest source of truth for a component

Generate first drafts in seconds

Make Designs, in the new Actions panel, allows you to quickly generate UI layouts and component options from text prompts. I’m less excited for this honestly because from what I’ve seen so far, even with Framer for example, it never generates what I’m looking for and there are limitations around design systems and brand. Could be fun for experimentation though.

Wire up a prototype instantly

Make prototype lets you create interactions and connections between frames in your selection. The benefit of this is to get your screens in front of users faster for testing.🔥 Some of the things you can do with the make prototype action are:

• Create simple flows between a selection of top-level frames

• Add interactions to back or next buttons

• Link to individual frames from a navigation menu

Rename layers automatically

Oh you know I’ll be using this one haha. If you felt pressured to keep your layers named as an employee, wait until you are your own boss. 😂 Figma AI will use a layer's contents, location, and relationship to other selected layers to choose a name. If you have the same unnamed layer across multiple top-level frames on the page, Figma will also rename any matching layers. 🙏

Alright so what are my observations here with the new AI releases?

All of this makes it easier for designers to:

1. Be efficient &

2. Stay organized.

Learn more about Figma’s new features.

Test it out in Figma 🖱️

The Future of Design with AI

💡 Read to the end to understand what the future holds.👇🏽 Next up:

• The Direction of Design

• Is the Barrier to Entry Lower?

• How to Stay Relevant

• The Rise of the Strategic Designer

• Humans are Charming