dfield

CEO of Figma here. Most of the original insights around vector networks were in 2013, though we continued to polish the implementation over time. We didn't exit stealth and ship the closed beta of Figma until December 2015 which is why there isn't blog content before then.

At first glance, this thesis looks super neat! I'm excited to check it out! I don't believe I've seen it before which is surprising given the overlap.

Nope, Brown generously gives you five years before you have to apply again. You just have to remember to go back...

https://www.brown.edu/academics/college/degree/policies/leav...

Hi, Dylan (Figma CEO) here. You can use local fonts in Figma via a local daemon helper, our native app or by adding the font to a shared library on our Org Plan. (Assuming you have an appropriate license for the font.)

We're also hopeful browsers will expose an API for accessing a list of local fonts / font metrics with the user's permission. (It's a fingerprinting issue to expose this info without the user opting in which is why browsers haven't built something like this in past.) This is gaining traction on the Chrome team, which is really exciting! https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=535764...

https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039956894-Use-Lo...

https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039956774-Manage...

At Figma we're pretty open with employees about this stuff.

+1 I loved this class

Yep, Evan is my cofounder! We started talking about building collaborative creative tools using WebGL shortly after he built this demo in an afternoon during summer 2011.

Shameless plug: if anyone is interested in working with us on Figma, we're hiring. https://www.figma.com/careers#jobs

I cofounded Figma with the support of the Thiel Fellowship. It was definitely worth it to me, but dropping out of school is a very unique and personal decision. You should definitely apply and you should introspect deeply before taking it.

BTW, some of the statements on this thread that "fellows are used as poster children for Thiel's vision of society" and equating taking the fellowship to becoming a "living cog in his anti-education political statement" are just downright false.

I actually assumed going in that we would need to do press or something; after all, I've always heard "there's no free lunch." However, in reality I found the fellowship never pressured me to do media if it wasn't helpful for Figma. In fact, Figma was in stealth mode for the entire two year fellowship. There's literally no downside other than not attending school for two years. (And you can quit at any time to go back.)

If anyone has specific questions about the fellowship, feel free to reply and I'll try to answer later today.

^ constexpr is the author

I tried switching to Soylent and I would consider this inhumane treatment for prisoners.

Yep — in the video, our primary goal for the UI was visual: we wanted something that was visually very different from Figma so it would stand out against the Figma interface. Makes sense the lack of substance shows through ;)

While we don't plan to change the video, I think your point absolutely has merit.

In theory, yes. In practice, we haven't invested in testing Linux because designers prefer other platforms.

First, thanks for the congrats :)

1. We didn't want to talk about ourselves before we had a product we believed in. So we kept quietly building and we didn't announce until (a) the performance was great, (b) we had the features designers needed to do their work day-to-day and (c) early alpha customers were visibly excited.

2. I think we might just have different points of view on this. Our approach has been to build towards a vision rather than test a hypothesis as quickly as possible.

Thanks! We generate CSS styles and make it easy to export assets. We don't generate layout code.

Thanks! I didn't submit, so no control over the title.

If you want me to bump you up on the waitlist, DM me on Twitter: I'm @zoink.

Hey all, I'm Dylan Field — author of the linked post / co-founder of Figma. If you have any questions, let me know!