Figma co-founder Dylan Fields appears to be a big fan of Enron—or rather, crypto-fuel The company's semi-parodic relaunch that hit the web earlier this week.
wearing an oversized enron hoodie During his extensive conversation with a WIRED editor steven levy During The Big Interview event in San Francisco on Tuesday, Fields said he had always been a fan of the Enron logo, which was the last one designed by the giant. American graphic designer Paul RandThe ABC, IBM, UPS and Westinghouse logos of fame. But he said he also got a “real kick” from Enron's potential relaunch. is tied to “Birds Aren't Real” creator Connor Gaydos. Being only 9 years old at the time of Enron's implosion in 2001, Field says he wondered (optimistically, it seems) whether it was possible to build a new company off the back of a tainted brand, given that That their generation can't be that kind of stuff the company is faltering Which others do.
Either way, it seems, it is a question of the power of design that Fields and Levy focused on more broadly as their conversation progressed, talking not only about the creation and development of the Figma platform, But also where the co-founder sees the company going in the immediate future.
Fields says the company currently has “millions” of users, a third of whom come from the design world, a third from the programming field, and a third from various other backgrounds. He believes that with Figma, brands and companies can express themselves better than ever before, exploring what is graphically possible, what the best user experience is, and how they can best stand out in the marketplace. We can work collaboratively to understand what might happen.
But in an age when AI has the ability to make most things look at least relatively good, Levy asked, how can companies using Figma expect to stand out? Field says the answer isn't just to lower the floor for novice designers and coders to get the kind of AI work that's already done, but to get the very best designers and coders to work beyond the previous limits of their skill set. “Raising the Limit” is what it helps to do. ,
Field says the best designers have the unique ability to manipulate interactivity, mobility, speed, and UX to create work that few others can accomplish. With or integrate with AI tools like Figma, he hopes more people will be “more limited by their ideas than by the tools in front of them,” ideally giving them a chance to match the work of some of the best designers. World.
While Field acknowledged the possibility that good design could help bad actors, citing a particularly well-designed magazine that ISIS published around 2014 or 2015 as an extreme use case. He says that all tools have the power to uplift people if they are built correctly.
“Most AI tools right now are about reducing the floor,” Field reiterated. “They're about making it so that there's democratization, and that's great in many ways, like you talk to people who do image production with diffusion models and some of them are doing art therapy, who have been doing it before. Was never possible.” Still, he said, it's important to raise the roof. “That's where a lot of our thinking is right now,” he said, “and I'm hopeful we can move in that direction.”
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