Takeover of Figma by Adobe: the CEO responds to the discontent of designers

Figma a réussi à construire une communauté loyale de 4 millions de designers qui utilisent ses outils.

Posted Sep 28, 2022, 2:21 PM

Is Figma a victim of its own success? The company co-founded in 2012 by Evan Wallace and Dylan Field announced on September 15 that it had accepted a takeover offer from Adobe for the tidy sum of $20 billion. The start-up, which specializes in online collaborative tools for creating site or app interfaces, has succeeded in building a loyal community of 4 million designers who use its tools. Some of them felt betrayed when the news broke.

“I want to congratulate Figma who has just alienated the whole profession,” said Angelos Arnis, designer at Flowhaven, a Finnish start-up, on Twitter. Another Figma user, Marvin Kaunda, went so far as to compare the acquisition to the “Purple Wedding” scene in Game of Thrones, which traumatized fans of the series. “Just a sharp pain in the chest,” he complained on the same social network.

Few changes

The CEO of the start-up wants to reassure the design community. “We had many conversations with Adobe,” assures Dylan Field in an interview with “Echos. “They don’t want to change prices, they don’t want trouble with the community, they want to make sure the community is strong, as strong as it is today. They also don’t want to integrate the two brands, they want the brand, the company and the operations to stand on their own. »

The CEO will remain at the helm of Figma. The acquisition will also allow him to launch new projects that are close to his heart. “I think this acquisition will allow us to use the technology that Adobe has created, as well as all the expertise that they have acquired over the last decades in many areas in which Figma does not have a presence,” explains the boss. He takes as an example “things like images, 3D, video or vector images,” illustrations that can be transformed without loss of quality.

Adobe XD failure

Same speech on the side of Adobe. In an interview with Business Insider , its chief product officer, Scott Belsky, acknowledged the failure of Adobe XD, which aimed to compete with Figma. This tool was built to work on a computer, while Figma bet from the beginning on the cloud and remote collaboration. “XD was made on the model of the old one. And so XD never generated any real revenue for us,” admits the director.

Which means, according to him, that Adobe is not a direct competitor of Figma. Adobe XD, overpriced and unsuitable for customer needs, generated just 15 million in revenue a year, a fraction of the 400 million claimed by Figma. The group, which specializes in the creation of photos, graphics, animations and videos, hopes to take advantage of Figma’s expertise to finally take the turn of the cloud.

New projects

For the moment, Figma offers two flagship products, the Figma platform which allows designers to work collaboratively remotely, and Figjam. This latest tool, launched during the pandemic, is aimed at all teams in a company, and not just designers. It allows them to “brainstorm”, always collaboratively and remotely.

Going forward, the CEO wants to invest in tools to facilitate “creative productivity.” Some users are already using the platform to create slides, he says. What, one day, to compete with Microsoft and its PowerPoint tool. In the meantime, Dylan Field and his teams want to focus on a new product aimed at facilitating collaboration between designers and developers.

The company, which has just crossed the bar of 900 employees, also continues to bet on international expansion. After Europe – Figma has opened offices in London, Paris and Berlin – the company now wants to tackle the Southeast Asian market.

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