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Dan Mall’s 10 Principles for a Worthy Design Career | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Dan Mall’s approach to a worthwhile design career centers on deliberate choices, continuous learning, and using experience strategically. He argues that designers should pursue goals that genuinely matter, improve their odds by leveraging their existing advantages, and define the desired outcome before beginning. His career across agencies, startups, teaching, and writing illustrates how varied experiences can reinforce one another. ## A Career Built Through Experimentation - Mall’s 25-year career has included agency work, entrepreneurship, teaching, apprenticeships, and authorship. - He views each role and project as an opportunity to learn, solve problems creatively, and grow personally. - His work includes founding an agency, launching startups, teaching thousands of students, and writing books about pricing, design systems, and scalable design. - Continuous learning means more than following trends; it involves expanding one’s capabilities and finding better ways to solve problems. ## Identify Worthy Goals - Before committing to an endeavor, Mall asks: - What outcome do I envision? - Will that outcome leave me better off? - He considers goals most worthwhile when they are thrilling, important, and daunting, following Michael Bungay Stanier’s framework. - His decision to start an agency grew from a desire to spend more time with his family while creating a more flexible career. - Excitement is especially important to him: if an idea does not inspire him, he generally does not pursue it. ## Place Bets on Unfair Advantages - Every decision is a bet because choosing one path means giving up others and accepting an opportunity cost. - Designers can improve their chances by choosing opportunities that exploit their strengths, such as: - Expertise - Reputation - Relationships and network - Resources - Unique insights - Mall’s agency benefited from his prior agency experience, established reputation, and steady client base. - He references the MILES framework for identifying advantages: - Money - Intelligence and insight - Location and luck - Education and expertise - Status - His experience running a design-at-scale agency gave him similar advantages when launching Design System University. ## Begin With the End in Mind - Mall follows Stephen Covey’s principle of defining the desired destination before starting. - When he began conference speaking, he set a specific goal: eventually speak at An Event Apart, whose speakers he admired and whose work influenced his development. - Clear, achievable outcomes help turn broad ambitions into focused career decisions. A practical takeaway is to choose goals that genuinely excite you, assess the advantages you already possess, and define success before investing significant time and energy.

Bringing new life to Figma’s brand | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Figma’s 2019 brand refresh expanded an existing visual language rather than replacing it. The process centered on collaboration, using research and Figma itself to create a brand that could feel both professional and playful. The result emphasized curiosity, vibrancy, honesty, boldness, and the imperfect process of making. ## Evolving an Existing Brand Language - Figma found that its original brand foundations were strong but had been created when the company was much smaller. - The refresh expanded the limited brand guide with additional rules for areas such as blog imagery and illustration. - Existing elements, including geometric shapes, were given new applications while remaining recognizable. - The goal was continuity: the new identity should feel like an extension of Figma’s original character. ## Defining Figma’s Personality - The team treated Figma as a person to clarify how the brand should behave and communicate. - Four personality traits became the main guideposts: - **Curious:** clever, playful, imaginative, and eager to explore. - **Vibrant:** dynamic, confident, energetic, and enthusiastic. - **Honest:** inclusive, empathetic, approachable, and willing to learn. - **Bold:** powerful, unexpected, nonconforming, and authentic. - These traits were intended to let the brand shift between consumer and enterprise audiences, and between reserved and playful expressions. ## Shapes That Represent Collaboration - Figma’s new illustrations use shapes as characters that interact, cooperate, disagree, or simply coexist. - Their positioning creates different compositions and communicates collaboration. - Illustrations vary in complexity: - Simple visuals support learning and clarity. - More abstract arrangements are used when the context allows greater expression. - Basic shapes can combine into complex images, making the construction process visible. - The illustrations deliberately show work in progress, including edited or manipulated elements, rather than presenting only polished final results. - This imperfect quality reflects the messy, evolving nature of design and encourages people to share how they make things. ## A Typeface with Hidden Character - Figma selected **Whyte** by Swiss type foundry Dinamo as its new brand typeface. - The team preferred Whyte’s **inktrap** version, which contains notches historically used in metal type to control pooled ink. - These details are subtle at small sizes but become visible when enlarged, giving the typography an illustrative quality. - The typeface supports Figma’s desired balance between conventional clarity and nonconforming personality. ## Refreshing Figma with Figma - The team created the entire refresh in Figma rather than relying on Photoshop or Illustrator. - Working in its own product challenged the designers to develop new workflows and creative techniques. - Collaboration was central, and Figma’s capabilities sometimes pushed ideas further than initially planned. - The tool became both the subject of the rebrand and the medium through which the new identity was developed. The refresh demonstrates how a growing company can strengthen its brand by extending existing principles, defining a clear personality, and making the creative process itself part of the identity.

Aisle Rocket Studios, the agency behind Whirlpool, masters collaboration | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Aisle Rocket Studios (ARS), a multi-office agency serving brands such as Whirlpool and Maytag, adopted Figma to solve the challenges of remote collaboration and fragmented workflows. By making Figma the shared source of truth, ARS brought designers, writers, developers, and clients into the same browser-based workspace. The result was faster iteration, more inclusive collaboration, and a more efficient creative process. ## Fragmented Files and Remote Collaboration - ARS had more than 250 employees, four offices, and remote associates supporting over 25 brands. - Creative work was scattered across native files in Sketch, Photoshop, and other tools. - When Creative Director Matt Carson joined the Whirlpool account remotely under a tight deadline, the lack of a centralized process became especially apparent. - Figma’s multiplayer functionality offered a real-time workspace for collaboration across locations and time zones. ## Figma as the Shared Source of Truth - The Whirlpool team quickly replaced disconnected workflows with a centralized Figma process. - Team members designed and iterated together in a single file. - They used Figma for internal meetings, stakeholder feedback, and client prototypes. - Clients could review interactive concepts without logging in or waiting for developers to build the experience, shortening review cycles. ## More Inclusive Creative Work - Figma enabled ARS to conduct roughly 80% of its creative process in the browser. - Writers could edit copy directly within designs instead of working separately and handing it off later. - This made copy an active design element and gave non-designers more influence over the final product. - Developers could review designs early, helping identify technical constraints before handoff and reducing back-and-forth. ## A Leaner, More Effective Team - The Whirlpool account team became faster and more collaborative after consolidating its tools and files. - Its success attracted attention across ARS, prompting other teams to adopt the same workflow. - Both ARS and Whirlpool reported savings in time and money without sacrificing creativity. - Open, collaborative design became a standard the agency wanted to apply more broadly. ## Building a Shared Design System - ARS’s next step was to create greater consistency across Whirlpool’s digital brand. - Following atomic design principles, the team planned to build standardized “atoms” in Figma. - These components would be stored in a team library as a central source of truth. ARS’s experience suggests that browser-based collaborative tools can unify distributed teams and make the creative process more democratic. Centralizing design, copy, development input, prototypes, and reusable components in one shared workspace can improve speed, communication, and consistency.

How Figma helped Sounds app reach 150k likes on Facebook | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Sounds app grew its Facebook page from a neglected channel with 14,000 fans and roughly 20 likes per post to more than 150,000 likes in under five months. Instead of hiring an agency, the company used audience research, reusable Figma templates, and modest targeted ad spending to create more engaging content in-house. The result was stronger organic reach at a fraction of the projected agency cost. ## Starting with Limited Resources - Sounds app’s marketing lead also handled community management, artist relations, and customer support. - An outside agency would have cost approximately $3,000–$5,000 or more per month, excluding advertising. - Facebook initially produced about 20 likes per post and reached only around 500 of the page’s 14,000 followers. ## Building a Repeatable Content Process - The team analyzed successful Facebook pages in the music, media, and app categories to identify high-performing content formats. - The designer created branded templates that could be quickly adapted with different artist images. - Templates were built in Figma rather than Photoshop so a non-designer could edit them easily. ## Figma Enabled Faster Collaboration - Figma worked across platforms, avoided expensive software licenses, and offered an approachable interface. - After a Slack session and a short screen-recorded tutorial, the marketing lead could create and publish content independently. - This eliminated delays caused by coordinating with a designer in another time zone and made it possible to act on ideas immediately. ## Measuring Results with Small Ad Budgets - The team began publishing Figma-created content in late October 2017 and used custom Branch links to track app downloads. - Posts that previously received 10–20 likes began generating thousands of likes, comments, and shares. - Weekly reach exceeded one million, and Facebook page likes grew to 60,000 by February 2018 and more than 150,000 the following month. - The team typically spent about $5 per post, increasing to $10 for especially successful content, with daily Facebook and Instagram spending capped at $25. - Paid reach generated additional organic sharing, increasing overall visibility. ## Lessons for Small Marketing Teams - Non-designers can produce effective social content when given channel-specific templates and accessible tools. - Successful social marketing depends more on understanding the audience and its preferred content than on formal marketing credentials. - Limited budgets can still produce substantial growth when teams experiment, measure results, and refine their approach. - The in-house strategy cost less than $3,000 in ad spending, compared with an estimated $20,000 for an agency over the same period. For lean teams, the article recommends combining reusable templates, audience research, tracking links, and controlled experimentation instead of assuming social growth requires an expensive agency.

Photo Filters Come to Figma | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Figma introduced Image Adjustments in 2017, bringing basic photo-filtering capabilities directly into its browser-based design tool. The feature lets designers modify exposure, contrast, saturation, temperature, tint, highlights, and shadows without exporting images to Photoshop or using workarounds. Figma positioned it as a convenience for quick edits—not a replacement for professional image-editing software. ## Figma’s Return to Photo Editing - Figma began partly as a Photoshop competitor, with early experiments involving browser-based photo filters and masks. - The new feature revisited that original direction in a focused, practical way. ## Image Adjustment Features - Designers can adjust: - Exposure - Contrast - Saturation - Temperature - Tint - Highlights - Shadows - Adjustments are available after placing an image on the canvas. - Users access the filtering controls through the **Fill** section of Figma’s right-hand properties panel. ## Designed for Quick Fixes - The feature eliminates the need to export images to Photoshop for simple changes. - Figma carefully balanced adjustment ranges to avoid undesirable results, such as overly blown-out images at high exposure levels. - The tools are intended to simplify common design tasks rather than provide comprehensive photo-editing capabilities. Figma’s Image Adjustments are best understood as a convenient set of in-product controls for fast visual corrections. Professional photographers and advanced editors will still need dedicated software, but designers can now handle routine image tweaks directly in Figma.