The making of Maker Week | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Maker Week is Figma’s twice-yearly company-wide tradition for exploring projects beyond everyday roles. In 2020, the event moved fully online, prompting Figma to prioritize connection, emotional expression, and collaboration over polished results. Its theme, “How to help one another,” shaped both the creative direction and the activities.

A Company-Wide Creative Tradition

• Maker Week is open to everyone, unlike hackathons that typically focus on engineering and design.
• Employees pause nonessential meetings and, when possible, interviews to collaborate with people outside their usual teams.
• The event is intended to remove day-to-day constraints and encourage experimentation rather than shipping finished products.
• Figma continued the tradition because maintaining company culture was especially important during remote work.

Prioritizing Process Over Output

• The 2020 event explicitly discouraged optimizing for productivity or delivering polished work.
• The emphasis was on working together, exploring ideas, and creating space for individual circumstances and capacity.
• This approach acknowledged the difficulty and uncertainty many employees were experiencing.

“How to Help One Another”

• Earlier Maker Weeks had no central theme beyond making something related to Figma.
• The new theme provided a guiding principle while responding to the broader challenges of 2020.
• It encouraged projects and interactions centered on support, empathy, and mutual help.

Designing Space for Vulnerability

• Remote work created emotional distance but also offered opportunities for people to share more openly.
• Figma’s creative direction aimed to give employees an outlet for whatever they were feeling.
• The organizers encouraged vulnerability and treated all emotional responses as valid.

Mood Characters

• Figma created a shared playground file where employees could build “mood characters.”
• Characters were assembled from familiar objects found around designers’ home workspaces.
• The objects represented the mixed, conflicting, and often confusing emotions of working through a difficult period.
• The activity gave everyone a simple way to make and share something, even without the time or energy for a larger project.

Bringing Maker Week Online

• Office-based traditions such as posters, shared breakfasts, and in-person kickoff moments had to be reimagined.
• Figma replaced them with digital experiences, including custom Zoom backgrounds.
• The company used visual design not only for branding, but also to create energy, delight, and a sense of shared participation remotely.

Maker Week’s remote adaptation shows how a company tradition can preserve its purpose by changing its format. By focusing on connection, vulnerability, and low-pressure creativity rather than productivity, Figma made the event relevant to the circumstances of its employees.