Dylan Field: Is AI Replacing Designers?, Design is the New Code & Democratizing Creativity

started in 2012 you raised some venture money the business takes off you're selling enterprise software you're doing really well and then adobe offers to buy the business for 20 billion dollars uh yeah correct quite the fast forward what year was that uh it was a few years back now I'm skipping through literally building the business. Yeah, you're like 10, 11 years in. But no, I mean, we have always respected Adobe, still do. And I'm a generational, incredible company that started everything from printing to making Photoshop what it is and the entire graphic design revolution. By the way, I was on Adobe Photoshop since 19...

In 1990, I did graphic design. Wow, so you're pre-layers? Actually, you and I haven't talked about this. Were you pre-layers? Yes. So I did graphic design pre-layers as a kid on computers, and I did it as a service for people in the neighborhood and small businesses and stuff. So cool. So how'd you get access to it? I was at my school, and then I was on a Macintosh. I got the first Mac original in 1984. And I was always fascinated with graphic design. It was something I loved doing as literally a hobby. You and I actually never talked about this. And then I used like Bryce 3D and all these early 3D tools.

And then when Kai's Power Tools came out. Kai's Power Tools is really cool. It reinvented Adobe Photoshop. And for me, it was like this incredible like expansion of creative potential and what you could do with Photoshop. So I've been a big Photoshop fan since the earliest days and a big user as a personal hobby. And like I made money on the side doing graphic design and stuff. That's awesome, man. As a kid. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Photoshop, of course, is like a product that is very mature and maybe beyond mature too, in that it has so many different parts of it that have been added over the years, which I think is the nature of a lot of software. It gets more bloated over time if you're not careful. But there's just so much that's possible with it. And, you know, Adobe as a company has been very inventive. So I've always had respect since I was a kid too.

Totally. And it felt like it was a time when we could join and not be totally absorbed. If we were smaller, I felt like maybe we would just kind of dissipate. And yeah, we signed the agreement, we said yes. And then various world governments decided that they didn't like it. Right. So like antitrust got involved and they blocked the deal. Yeah. I mean, antitrust is kind of like a broad way to refer to it, but you have the united states european union cma and you know it's very different vibe and and they said years ago adobe would be taking out a big competitor they said a lot of things uh but the i think most important part for us was that we just kept putting our foot in the gas i mean yeah i thought it would be like sort of we would just go right through and as soon as a month or two in it was clear that was not the case yeah it kind of became okay like we got to like really power through as an organization here and ship and build like the next stuff because if we don't power through and keep our foot on the gas you know what's another side we don't know what's another side uh we gotta make sure everything's fine no matter what so this is 2023 how many employees did you have uh i want to say it was about 1100 1200 after double check okay so when

i heard this story i was fascinated by and i think i saw you in 2024 march of 24 i don't know if you remember I mentioned this to you. But for me, the story of telling 1,200 employees of a startup, we have one of the most incredible exits in history, $20 billion exit of this company, and it's not going to happen. What was the all hands like when you get in front of everyone and you tell everyone, guys, this isn't going to happen? And how do you get everyone to realign on building a business and continuing forward when it feels like the floor, for some people may have felt like the floor fell out from under them.

Well, I think you have to remember the length of the regulatory review, which definitely needs to be fixed somehow because it's, you know, if you're in a situation where it's actually anti-competitive, which I still don't believe the Adobe thing was for what it's worth. A lot of people, you know, on the internet probably would say it is, uh like or at least they did back then but i thought their arguments were poor and they were fighting past battles not looking at the future and what this all would become uh but the um and i say that not because i'm not like i'm stoked to be independent too i'm stoked to be running figma that was the plan for adobe was just run figma uh either way uh running figma i'm happy independently we do move fast i'm glad i'm grateful for that but uh going back to your question it's like we had 16 months of regulatory review 16 months of regulatory review for any company is punishing and uh in an actual anti-competitive situation that could be like very destructive for one of the parties right Or both.

And I think Roomba is a great example, actually. Roomba was going to be acquired. Small deal. Yeah, it wasn't like a crazy deal. But they want to punish Amazon. And so they did not let it go through. And because of that, Roomba went bankrupt. And the entire market at the time basically went to China. So from the United States standpoint, it made no sense. Anyway, I go on a tangent, but I do think it's an important point. There's some policy stuff here that's like when you go for the idealism, It doesn't always practically, like, help America. But it's also an important point, which is almost all markets now are more expansive than they have been historically.

And nearly anything that looks like, oh, it's the market, that's not actually the market. The market is AI, it turns out. Yeah, I mean, exactly. The market is this massive market, and this deal is 1% and 0.2% of the market. Yeah, it's like, do you define the market looking back at the history, which is like the only logical way you do it as a regulator? Or do you do it as a technologist looking forward? And that could be very different in terms of how you think about markets, about sizes. But in any case, the all hands, it was actually the first day of a winter break, which is pretty funny. So we had told everybody, okay, you know, enjoy the holidays.

we actually have way less traffic during the holidays because we're a work product and that was a friday and then um realized sort of over the weekend okay this is going to come to a conclusion and on monday morning uh sent a message to everybody saying hey all hands at noon and uh dial in if you like and here's what's going on and here's like the full sort of uh details And so, first of all, so much of the company showed up. That was awesome just to see the turnout. You know, first day of break, really. And secondly, I'd say just like the mood was relief. Because it wasn't about relief of not Adobe.

It was relief of not having ambiguity. To have ambiguity that long is really intense. And people have to kind of have two worlds in their head. They're not exactly sure what the future holds. So that was the immediate mood. It was just kind of like lighter. And then from there, yeah, I think that the question you asked is, right, how do you make sure everyone's all in? And the way that we did it was we said, look, I just kind of put a video out into the company Slack and emailed everybody and said, hey, if you're tired after working really hard, if you're someone who joined during this period thinking you're going to go work at Adobe and actually the startup thing is not for you,

Dylan Fieldlike please know we're going to be working very hard hustling hard and no shame like we're still on good terms if you want to leave here is a few months pay uh and you're welcome to just let us

know we'll make it super easy and from there uh you know six months before you can reapply that's the only condition uh after six months you can reapply and we'll uh re-interview you and it was a pretty small percentage of people that took us up on that but overall it was healthy and some people actually ended up doing total career pivots like in wild ways uh went on different life paths like i think it's healthy for everyone you continue you to build the business it grows you go public and i just want to fast forward to earlier this year you guys announced a partnership with anthropic claude design oh we not quite we we have been working with anthropic as a partner and the topic uh separately announced cloud design yes oh sorry yeah that's right but you had a connector with them that you announced earlier in the year yeah we have an mcp we are partnered with many companies but then then they announced Claude Design. Was that surprising to you when they did that? And how worried were you when they came out with Claude Design relative to what you guys were offering? Because the market looked at it and said, oh my God, Figma's dead. Claude is going to crush Figma. I mean, the nature of online

discourse right now is we're so back, it's so over. And it's just a cycle, right? I mean, how many times have you been all over uh in the last like month yes probably yeah you know a bunch of times i don't even know about yes and everyone i think i was kind of used to that at that point right because you know you when when you kind of die uh so many times and then you're actually like not dead right you kind of realize at some point maybe maybe this is like not the truth social media is actually like not reality but um yeah i i uh was overall surprised at the way that kind of communication happened uh i think that you know look everybody wants to do good usually i mean there's some exceptions but for the most part that's that's what i assume for people they want to win they want to do good and i think that organizations scaling really fast anthropic like are there any examples of organizations scaling that fast ever never can get very confused and mixed up internally and due to that weird stuff can happen and i think that it's just the case that yeah we're on the other side of kind of like a weird bout of uh communication there Did it affect your business?

Oh, no. Not any degree that was significant. Because I read your quarterly report after that announcement. You guys grew 48% year over year. And the business basically accelerated its growth. So I'm looking at that. And this was when everyone had the SaaSpocalypse thesis in general. And I was a big subscriber to SaaSpocalypse. But I do think that there's a bunch of ways to distinguish SaaS companies, one of which I think is founder led. And I think that there's user experience that matters a lot, embedded user experience, and the ability to kind of build from there, especially if you know how to use AI to accelerate and reinvent your business as a founder, particularly, but your business accelerated.

Yep. No, it's been continuing to do well. And I think that, look, the hard part about model companies and product is like, what is the product? Is it the model? Is it the UI on top? Is it some hybrid of both? If it's a hybrid, how is it weighted? And in any case, You're talking about like an Anthropic, an OpenAI, a Gemini. Yeah, I mean, like whether it's a harness for coding or it's a product like Cloud Design, which you just mentioned,

Dylan FieldI think it's easy to mistake model progress for product progress.

Right. The reality is a tool like Figma, you know, has taken a very long time to build and a very long time to make sure that we get the workflows right for our users. And we still have work to do. Our users will tell you that. And we're always trying to make it better. So I think that it's sort of not surprising that it wasn't an instant hit or something when there's actually quite a lot of work on the... Just a core user journey workflow side that you have to do to meet the needs of professionals. Now, they've made a cloud design into a product that is broad. So, it's trying to do a lot of things. You'll see posters and stuff as well, like graphic design scenarios, I believe, when you go to their homepage. And maybe they'll do well in some areas and on others. I'm not bullish or bearish on the product. I think it's just hard to make good design tools professionals.

yeah there's a lot of things to design and yeah and also categories of design the feel of it is like an instrument you have to get the feel right you have to get mechanics right yeah and we've stressed every detail of that and have had a lot of feedback over the years about what people like and don't like it depends on where they're coming from it depends on uh their task and sort of like what they're trying to overall do and there's so many scenarios but overall uh you know i think that there are more modes for software than are implied by the SaaSpocalypse. And it's not like software as a category is binary, good or bad. There are plenty of other ways that you can make sure that you're able to sustain yourself long term and you have a growing business long term as a software company or app layer company. And part of it is, yes, if you're as specialized as possible on a target audience and you know your audience and you're building for them, that is something that matters. And I think a great example of this is Cursor.

Cursor, by all means, should not have grown the way they did. You've got all these frontier labs that are chasing them with their own models before Cursor had a model of any kind. But yet, But Cursor, really obsessed over the user. They saw our own corners. They strategized. They made sure they were doing the right thing for the customer. And they've had an incredible success. Yeah. And I think it's amazing. And I think it's an example that will be repeated across many different types of companies. SaaS is not dead. Well, I think that it's not true that all SaaS companies are fine. Yeah. And it's also not true that all SaaS companies are dead.

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And this magical technology takes off and does it. and I end up with a product. Sometimes the product is great. Sometimes the product sucks. But it's improving the ability for these tools to do that. Historically, I would have needed a product manager, a designer, a bunch of engineers to do the actual building of the product, whether it's a software product or a hardware product. Increasingly, though, it seems like AI is doing more and more of those tools. can you just give me your view on the future of human creativity in this era this future era that we're waltzing into the singularity we're falling into where does human creativity play a role and where do the gaps still need to be filled for taking human creativity to the realization moment it's the case i think that uh we're lowering the floor with ai making it so that all of the production whether it's code or it's uh motion video design whatever you name it uh if it's digital you're lowering the floor to make it happen um everyone can be part of that and it's more democratized ironically and i i used to believe uh even a few years ago i said it our annual user conference config i said the ceiling will be raised by ai you'll be able

Dylan Fieldto do greater things before that was wrong uh the ceiling has stayed the same ai is not raising the ceiling humans are raising the ceiling though uh the creatives the designers out there when they

choose to focus invest their time and to be bold and try to do something no one else has ever done before that's when we see the ceiling raised and at that point uh it's a question of do you care about being in the center distribution do you care about like a mean or average result uh is that sufficient for your task or do you need something that shows that you care that you took the time to actually like go make this thing? Do you need to go and be beyond what is the minimum bar? And in the world of software design and product, I mean, we're seeing exponentially more software than ever before.

It's exactly what you'd predict. The exponential continues. You look at App Store numbers. The App Store numbers are exactly that same exponential. and we're seeing that the usage and utilization of apps flat so people are using just the same amount of apps but the amount of apps that you can get it's like bigger than ever and growing and i think it just speaks to okay there's a need to differentiate yourself if you're building any kind of software well how do you do that it's not code because anyone can create code now that's not the hard part anymore so my view is design is the new code it's the layer above you have to make it so that your design is differentiated and you have to have a point of view and a good brand and marketing and the point of view i think is the part that is probably missed the most that's the human part it's not just the human part it's also the part that humans are uncomfortable having uh i think that folks are scared to say something that's not consensus it's so true i mean this is what the greatest artists the greatest business leaders the greatest politicians have always demonstrated is the willingness to to be brave to say and do the things that no one else would

say or do and that's what changes the world and i would also add comedians to the mix too comedians comedians are underappreciated i had tony hinchcliffe at our thing last year because he's like one of the few guys that is willing to say and do things nowadays in the cancel culture era but comedians often like speak truth in a way that people otherwise couldn't hear willing to say things and uh it's not about political correctness it's about do you have a message that can rise above the noise and do so in a sustained way because look at social media right now like every unique point of view everything interesting it gets diffused into like the ether of social media instantly and so unless you've got uh something that allows you to kind of keep generating content and a message that is really evergreen because it's so outside of the Overton window, you're not going to be able to actually break through and have any attention. And the attention economy is ruthless. Is this also what human creativity is? If you're not doing something that's never Never been done before. You're not creating something. You're mimicking something. You're copying something. You're Xeroxing something. But to do something new is to create. And newness requires doing things that have never been done before.

Yeah, by definition. And therefore, you are operating outside of this distribution of training. It's not even about operating outside the mean of the distribution, which is where you start if you're just prompting without any kind of advanced scaffolding around it. But you're actually doing something that is breaking through, and it's unique. And I do think that will be rewarded by the market. Everyone's going to see it. I think it's even rewarded by the attention market of organizations. i'm already hearing from so many like oh i got another deck made by ai today totally and i don't even know if the person who made it i like don't know if they read it do they even know what's in their deck and at figma we actually made it so that uh it was just a simple thing but we said hey if you are uh using ai in your writing of any kind just put at the top written with ai very simple very easy to follow uh and you know people made jokes about internally but people do it and it makes it so that we can all trust that when we see something we know that it's been cared for enough that it's like worth your time to process and i uh i think that we're going to see some bifurcation here around trust uh and one way to get trust is to do something with your

hands the other point that's important is if you have a vision or if you have a point of view in your head of how something should be designed or look aesthetically or from an experiential standpoint you're i think it's great to start with building with ai it gives you something to get past like the blank page blank canvas problem you can then react to it and say here are all the things i don't like i'm gonna i'm gonna go fix these things i'm gonna change them up because it's really helpful to have a back and forth. But if you don't, if you have your own vision and you're trusting AI to implement it, you're doing it through the lens of AI.

And like AI has kind of like its own distribution. The model fit by it, yeah. Yeah, and so you're not going to get exactly what you want. Now, if you're able to do both, and that's what we're trying to enable in Figma, make code of material on the canvas, make it so that you can go start by building. you can build to think if you like uh but also when you want to think and work with your hands you can do that too right and go back and forth rapidly right i remember the early days of photoshop just having been a user avid user from the early days people freaked out when layers happened and then they freaked out when all the filters came out and when kai's power tools came out and everyone was like what's the role of the photographer anymore it's like you're destroying the art of photography the creativity of photography but it unleashed a new era of creativity because now these new artists emerged that could use these filters and use these layering tools and capabilities to reimagine what's possible on a canvas and it was basically a new toolkit it doesn't mean that the old creatives mapped perfectly to the new creative system and tools. But there was an explosion in creativity and human potential that arose from

this. And we pushed boundaries in all sorts of ways. It feels like we might be entering that era again. I'm a big believer in that. And I think that part of it is what I described about market dynamics. In order to get attention, in order to get engagement, in order to get people to care, you have to do something new. You have to actually be daring and try things that are bold. The resistance to change is real, and there's a great thing you can Google, actually, for your point. Look up the mailing list. for when layers was introduced and it's like people going this is the worst thing ever uh and you can find it if you google it's like on a mailing list that's publicly available and you can see all the reactions totally um but obviously it became the future and i think that uh there's also still photographers in the world who are doing incredible work but the bigger disruption if we're going to be real it was the camera phone uh that was what made it so that people stopped buying cameras that were dedicated to the task of photography because the best camera is the one that's on you and started treating photography a different way with Instagram and their camera phone. So it transformed for a lot of people. And I can't tell you if it's better

or worse as a result, but there was change. There's one view on human creativity that human creativity is basically connecting dots in the unconscious that you've had seen or experienced all of these things in your life or in your set of inputs sensory inputs and from those inputs you connect dots and then you extrapolate a forward view of things that hasn't perhaps been seen in the world before do you agree with that view on creativity and is it distinct from actually what ai does and again i want to go back to the uniqueness of the human in an ai era well i i think that um one thing that happens with humans is they're always seeking novelty like our reward function is different than like an ai's also our loss function like if i was to open this bottle of water and splash it all over you and you got bad at me like you bet i'm not going to do that again but in ai like you know with rl you gotta like really tell it a bunch of times uh uh that no you don't do that um robots stop kicking me yeah well and maybe that'll change with architectures over time but like overall the brain is different uh than the current systems that we've made with ai and i i think that uh it's unknown we don't know much about neuroscience

uh overall i'd love to get to the point where like we all know more about neuroscience but something is fundamentally different there when it comes to creativity and i also think design is different than creativity it's not just creativity it's also problem solving like i mentioned earlier and the combination of the two is i i just find it fascinating because you have a user you're trying to solve their needs you're trying to do so in a way that stands out as creative and it connects with them and also like you have to connect to wider systems the marketing brand the culture the business problems uh and so on and and like holding all that in your head at different levels of abstraction while trying to like deliver a screen or a flow uh that like from a search-based standpoint can be a commentorial explosion is just pretty cool it's pretty fascinating i'm actually personally really excited about the idea of reinventing existing art form and media where ai can enable more dynamic generation where the creator steps up a level sets a bunch of parameters but doesn't actually necessarily render the final product but the final product sort of like in a video game is rendered on the fly with the user in front of it

but the creator the creative team behind a video game for example is building all of the objects They're building the storyline, they're building the narrative flow, and the realization of that is much more dynamic, but I feel like it's going to find its way, it's going to leach its way into many more different media. We have products around that too, like in Figment Design, you can have generative tools and shaders where you can do very much that, or we have a product called Weave, and Weave is basically a node-based. You can connect model outputs into other inputs and such. And the whole idea is like, it's not bad to generate with AI, but you need a way to craft that clay. You need a way to mold it. And with Weave, people do like the most amazing video and video work. And overall, just like the outcomes that are achievable with it are incredible.

uh so yeah i think that if you've got the intention if you actually care to do the work um you can always get to a better result and people you know new model drops there's like this ai psychosis moment that people are in for a few days and it's like i think also aided by algo feeds totally the best results rise to the top everyone's like this model is everything yeah And then a few days later, it's, it's okay. Okay. I know the kind of like main tropes of the model. Um, and you adapt fast, like the novelty is gone. It no longer is a thing that's, that's kind of like rewarding you or firing off your dopamine system or whatever. And instead you're like, okay, well, yeah, it always does that thing. How do I move past it?

And that seems to be the continued loop we're in, which is sort of fascinating because models keep getting so good when it comes to these formal domains, math, cybersecurity, IQ points just stack and stack and stack. And then for creativity and for design, it's very incremental progress overall.

Dylan FieldMaybe that will change at some point, but I think the fact that these are non-verifiable domains has something to do with it.

And it's probably the fact that maybe that is the human role in the AI toolkit, which is conceive, create, design, and let the AI do more of the work, but it gives you the ability to do much more work. Any art or media that you're particularly excited about or interested in that's kind of emerging right now? You know, I find it fascinating when people do sort of like new AI experiments. For example, it's the media category. There was a designer artist type that made a web page the other day. And it was like a letter to Figma, actually. So it caught my attention because I was, you know, getting the Figma hit on the algo feed.

and every time you moved away from it uh and came back it got slightly more degraded and it was basically a comment on attention i thought that was really cool oh cool um that was a piece of art i thought so it was web page yeah but like i thought that the technique and the way that they went about it was really neat and like not something that many others have done And I've seen a few other things like that. But overall, I thought it was a very cool way to do it. It was also just a very well-written letter. I like the letter, too. But, yeah, I see stuff like this. And, you know, back in the day, I remember seeing people do, like, NFT art with AI when NFTs were a thing.

You know, so it was, like, 2019 or something like that. But the way they did it sometimes was really remarkable. I mean, Holly Herndon's work around taking her voice and making it so that her voice was something that people could use in an almost open source way. That was quite incredible and ahead of its time. And I think this sort of play between what is me, what is the collective, and what is it that is unique and ownable versus what is not is quite fascinating. I've always been fascinated by that intersection. Yeah, that's cool. Just as we wrap up, a lot of the commentary on AI that's negative is that it takes away human agency, human potential gets capped out. Can you just talk a little bit about your view on the potential of every human to be a creative, to be a designer?

And how AI might perhaps magnify every person, not just the, quote, creatives, whether in some elite class of artists in some special building, but the ability for every human to create and the ability for every human to design and produce things in the world and where you sit with that right now. I think it's even broader. I think it's, as a human in general, pre-AI, post-AI, you have a choice. Do you want to consume or create? Do you want to take the easy path or do you want to like climb the mountain? and what i'm seeing happen right now a lot is people are letting ai think for them uh less at figma but like more just like in my interactions with the world uh i just see a lot of this at the

Dylan Fieldmoment and that's one path you can take but the other one is actually use ai to further your understanding of the world to learn to do things you never would have dared to do before because

they were would have taken so much time to learn or it's so hard uh and to really expand like the potential ways that you can like live as a human uh that to me the latter is the interesting part yeah the former like why would i want something else to think for me like my entire life has been about like figuring out how to think and um i don't know i just hope that people use ai to create good and to like go be a force for it rather than just kind of like joining the hive mind. Everyone can be a maker. Everyone can be a maker. Everyone can go do bold things. It's about willpower and it's about curiosity and if you're curious and you're willing to do the work be brave and speak your truth. Yeah exactly and then I think that you can go do incredible things.

we will probably see a vastly different setup in the future where things that we can't imagine are possible and things we take for granted are no longer in sort of the realm of what humans do every day. How exactly that will look I don't think either of us can tell but it is the case that both were under the precipice of great change and nothing hit home for me more than the math dropped last night uh from open ai of 700 plus papers on all sorts of very famous problems uh that that was a show of something uh i had a lot of emotions i don't i don't know how to process i thought it was the greatest day of discovery in human history oh i mean factually yes yes and also like something about it was like brilliant and exciting and something about was kind of sad yeah and i i don't know how to articulate the sadness but it felt like we lost something and gained something at the same time i don't know i lift my head up and i look at the next frontier and i think that the frontiers are brighter and wider and more accessible than they've ever been so i'm pretty excited oh i'm excited too and i think that the world will look amazing and uh i'm an optimist yeah i think there's gonna be a lot of challenges and we'll figure them out

yeah uh how exactly and what the challenges will be in their full form we have yet to see but yeah i do think that like math is uh something that somehow has a quality of mystery to it like an unsolved problem uh is it you know is this conjecture true or false how why uh grappling with that mystery is something that is special and uh i i'm both excited for the progress and like all the things that make possible and also like i don't think it's wrong to like mourn the loss of a little mystery right fair enough dylan this has been a great chat should we go have another drink sounds good let's do it thanks man thanks I'm going all in