When you ship furniture, you rarely have the chance to fix your mistakes. The design and execution need to be as close to perfect as possible. The digital world is different (duh, Pease) — you have daily opportunities to make improvements.

Furniture gives function to what is otherwise empty space. The primary purpose is to support the act of living, whatever that means for each user.Furniture itself is not the focus; the life you create around it is what matters.

The challenge of Figma is to design a product whose ultimate value is how well other people are able to design their own products. This means that Figma should fade away, and enable users to focus solely on their ideas.

It is possible to do a lot with a very basic toolset. A hammer can be used to build a small cabinet or an entire house. With Figma, we’ve tried to whittle down our primary drawing tools to the most foundational yet versatile set, tools that are well-equipped for tasks both simple and complex.

Our pen tool, for example, has been rethought to feel and function more similarly to a physical pen. Vector objects in Figma are drawn as networks of points, rather than traditional paths, meaning you can connect any point to any other point. This change allows for a more flexible and natural drawing process, shifting the focus from procedure to production.