Source: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/dylan-field-startup-figma-to-take-on-adobe-183328097.html
Four years ago, Dylan Field dropped out of Brown University on a whim to become a member of the Thiel Fellowship, a two-year program founded by billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. After three years of development, his software interface design tool Figma launched on Wednesday for desktop and mobile.
The San Francisco-based startup with 20 employees promises a user interface inside its desktop and web browser app that’s much easier to get around than Adobe Illustrator and features that aren’t buried beneath layers and layers of options to click through. As Field demonstrated, creating an icon of say, a simple mechanical cog, is accomplished in a fraction of the time with Figma versus Illustrator.
Figma’s standout feature is simply called “Multiplayer.” Because much of Figma, and the work designers do in Figma, is saved and crunched on remote servers — instead of traditionally, your computer — two designers are able to easily design things together on the fly, even if one user is in San Francisco and the other is in Dubai. It’s a feature Google Docs users took for granted for years, but one designers haven’t yet enjoyed.
Field and Wallace hope that by offering designers a 3-month free trial — and letting student designers use Figma for free — they’ll be able to build a solid following among the design community, one that still largely relies on tools like Adobe Illustrator. And while they haven’t landed on a pricing plan, Field said Figma would follow a Software as a Service (SaaS) business model, whereby software is licensed on a monthly or annual subscription basis.
Whether or not Figma gains the traction it needs to become a serious player in the design community, Rimer contends software design is ripe for innovation, and Figma has the goods to make a difference.
Visit Figma to get started.
Four years ago, Dylan Field dropped out of Brown University on a whim to become a member of the Thiel Fellowship, a two-year program founded by billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. After three years of development, his software interface design tool Figma launched on Wednesday for desktop and mobile.
The San Francisco-based startup with 20 employees promises a user interface inside its desktop and web browser app that’s much easier to get around than Adobe Illustrator and features that aren’t buried beneath layers and layers of options to click through. As Field demonstrated, creating an icon of say, a simple mechanical cog, is accomplished in a fraction of the time with Figma versus Illustrator.
Figma’s standout feature is simply called “Multiplayer.” Because much of Figma, and the work designers do in Figma, is saved and crunched on remote servers — instead of traditionally, your computer — two designers are able to easily design things together on the fly, even if one user is in San Francisco and the other is in Dubai. It’s a feature Google Docs users took for granted for years, but one designers haven’t yet enjoyed.
Field and Wallace hope that by offering designers a 3-month free trial — and letting student designers use Figma for free — they’ll be able to build a solid following among the design community, one that still largely relies on tools like Adobe Illustrator. And while they haven’t landed on a pricing plan, Field said Figma would follow a Software as a Service (SaaS) business model, whereby software is licensed on a monthly or annual subscription basis.
Whether or not Figma gains the traction it needs to become a serious player in the design community, Rimer contends software design is ripe for innovation, and Figma has the goods to make a difference.
Visit Figma to get started.
