Figma cofounder Dylan Field is seemingly a big Enron fan—or rather, of the crypto-fueled semi-parodic relaunch of the company that hit the web earlier this week.
Sporting an oversized Enron hoodie during his conversation with WIRED editor at large Steven Levy during The Big Interview event in San Francisco on Tuesday, Field said he has always been a fan of the Enron logo, which was the last one crafted by legendary American graphic designer Paul Rand of ABC, IBM, UPS, and Westinghouse logo fame. But he said he also “got a real kick” out of the potential Enron relaunch, which has been tied to “Birds Aren’t Real” creator Connor Gaydos. As someone who was just 9 years old when Enron imploded in 2001, Field says he wonders (optimistically, it seems) whether it’s possible to build a new company on the back of the tainted brand, given that his generation might not carry the kind of baggage related to the company’s stumbles that others do.
Either way, it seems, it’s a question of the power of design, something Field and Levy focused on more broadly as their chat went on, talking not just about the creation and evolution of the Figma platform but also about where the cofounder sees the company going in the immediate future.
At the moment, Field says, the company has “millions” of users, with a third coming from the design world, a third coming from the programming space, and a third coming from various other backgrounds. With Figma, he thinks, brands and companies can express themselves visually much better than ever before, working collaboratively to more quickly understand what’s graphically possible, what the best user experience is, and how they can best stand out in the marketplace.
But in an age when AI has the potential to make most things look at least relatively good, Levy asked, how can companies using Figma hope to stand out? Field says the answer isn’t just lowering the floor to meet novice designers and coders, something that kind of AI work has already done, but “raising the ceiling” to help pretty good designers and coders work beyond the previous limits of their skill sets.
The best designers, Field says, have a unique ability to manipulate interactivity, dynamism, motion, and UX to create work that few others can meet. With AI tools like the ones Figma has or will integrate, he hopes that more people will be “limited more by their ideas than the tools in front of them,” ideally giving them the chance to match the work of some of the best designers in the world.
While Field acknowledged the possibility that good design can help bad actors, citing a particularly well-designed magazine that ISIS put out around 2014 or 2015 as an extreme use case, he says all tools have the power to lift people up if they’re made correctly.
“Most of the AI tools right now are about lowering the floor,” Field reiterated. “They’re about making it so there’s democratization, and that’s great in many ways, like you talk to people that do image generation with diffusion models, and some of them are doing art therapy, which was never possible before.” Still, he added, it’s important to raise the ceiling. “That’s where a lot of our thinking is right now, and that’s where I hope we can drive toward.”
