Config 2021
2021-04-21..2021-04-22
-- online --
Config ·
[Config 2020, Config 2021, Config 2022, Config 2025, Config 2026]
who it's for
product designers, design managers, design system maintainers, design engineers, frontend engineers, ux researchers, plugin developers
topics
FigJam whiteboarding features; interactive components in Figma; branching and merging workflows; multiplayer scaling performance; WebGL and WebAssembly rendering; design system accessibility auditing; Figma plugins and automation; rapid prototype testing; cross-discipline collaboration practices; community open design pipelines; spatial software design
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Day 1 Opening Keynote | Dylan Field | 22m |
Announces concrete features: branching and merging on the organization plan with a safe branch workflow and explicit merge, a rebuilt mobile app for reliable… | ||
| Short stories from the making of FigJam | Jenny Wen, Emily Lin, Priya Kotak | 25m |
A small cross functional team decides to build FigJam starting in June with a first engineer in September and internal testing in mid‑January with about 100… | ||
| We should be replaceable: how we can build timeless design systems | Au Pleguezuelo | 28m |
Argues that making designers replaceable produces more durable systems and lays out specific practices: a GitHub-scale color system and a public Figma file… | ||
| Uniting for cross-platform storytelling | Natalie Kuehn, Ethan Byun, Kriss Chaumont | 23m |
Concrete outcomes and tools not theory: a shared Figma files for shared research workflow and an election palette negotiated across teams, Storybook used for… | ||
| Exploring spatial software | John Palmer | 27m |
Gives a crisp claim: spatial software is a genre with real subcategories, a usable design framework, and concrete tradeoffs. Demonstrates tools and… | ||
| Design bitcoin for everyone | Christoph Ono, Johns Beharry | 29m |
Community builds a working open design pipeline: Slack plus 24/7 Jitsi for conversations, GitHub for issues and a public website, and open-source Figma files… | ||
| Behind the gradient: Inner workings of design at Stripe | Connie Yang, Tayler Aitken | 27m |
Stripe Design actually replaces an all-card dashboard with a cardless UI, running weekly prompt-driven design sprints that generate ~150 concepts from seven… | ||
| Collaborative creativity | Nikolas Klein | 24m |
Claims that innovation needs bisociation and fast externalization drive the talk: examples range from 1954 Teflon-to-nonstick discovery to TikTok Sea Shanties… | ||
| The journey to interactive components | Jamie Wong | 32m |
Figma ships interactive components that let instances keep overrides and wired interactions across variants and work in-place; the product goal is to cut… | ||
| Should devs design? | Mina Bach | 22m |
Claim: everyone on a team contributes to design. Specifics: teams watch user session recordings, run guerilla user testing, prototype in Figma and iterate… | ||
| Unexpected places: Figma as a space for anything and everything | Ace Chen | 25m |
Five vignettes show concrete outcomes not vague promises: a component‑based Animal Crossing avatar maker that grows into 65 unique assets, a months‑long IDOT… | ||
| Even by design | Linda Dounia Rebeiz | 28m |
Argues design is whitewashed and offers concrete tools: a timed memory moodboarding exercise to collect lost influences, a Masters phone book to map harmful… | ||
| How to build a compelling vision when building from zero to one | Helena Jaramillo | 26m |
Builds Coda’s publishing platform Doc Gallery by recreating published pieces inside Coda, adding a cover photo subtitle and author byline, converting side… | ||
| From relay to road trip: fostering cross-discipline collaboration | Aubrie Phillips | 24m |
Positions cross-discipline work as a switch from a risky baton-style handoff to a road trip where teams co-collaborate from kickoff using norming, retroing and… | ||
| Pushing Figma to its limits | Chudo Loo, Andrei Iancu, Gleb Sabirzyanov, Vitalii Sologub, Shuaiqi Sun | 28m |
Session shows concrete, reproducible Figma hacks and what actually works: a zero-pixel frame trick to pin geometry out of Auto Layout; a single-component… | ||
| What can we learn from the new generation of designers? | Lucas Coelho | 27m |
Argues for hiring juniors and shows concrete practices: a design team across three countries runs regular retreats and weekly one‑on‑ones, anonymous surveys… | ||
| Everything is not fine (and that's okay) | Nannearl Brown | 31m |
Therapist advice is to make time for journaling and rest; a thirty‑minute entry repeatedly surfaces genuine limits and once prompted rescheduling just before a… | ||
| Using Figma to go beyond Figma | Dylan Babbs, Vietanh Nguyen | 25m |
Shows a concrete Figma-driven infrastructure: library analytics plus an invisible pixel in components, Figma API scans that count real usage across ~3,000… | ||
| Tiny tots have thoughts too! | Mischelle Mulia | 24m |
Clever tests with 6–9 year olds using kid-sized labs (coffee tables, pillows, clear parent sightlines) and remote sessions, finds sessions are roughly 60%… | ||
| Auditing design systems for accessibility | Anna E. Cook | 26m |
Claim: 98% of the web had accessibility issues and 67% originate in design. The process shows how to audit a design system from atoms to patterns: capture… | ||
| Day 1 Closing Keynote - Designing the Biden-Harris campaign | Robyn Kanner | 26m |
The Biden‑Harris design team claims it designs web, plane, stage and merch all in one Figma file, uses rapid response playbooks and mock debates to rehearse… | ||
| Day 2 Opening Keynote - Deep dive into Figma’s new features | Yuhki Yamashita | 30m |
FigJam is a new digital whiteboard that demonstrates concrete features: templates and sticker libraries with components that include variants, quick shortcuts… | ||
| Confessions of a flawed designer | Pablo Stanley | 15m |
A candid account of going from defensive mythmaking to deliberate practice: claim is that ego and craving for praise block problem solving, remedy is to listen… | ||
| Design critique from hell | Julia Kestner | 20m |
A team revives hated critiques by changing names, moving into Figma for live collaboration, limiting groups to four or five, and treating sessions as quick… | ||
| Designing for code | John Meguerian | 20m |
Design files should mirror the codebase and cut endless back-and-forth: use Figma to build a documented components views prototype workflow that maps to React… | ||
| Grand visions for a design system grounded in reality | Hugo Raymond | 20m |
Burberry builds a multi-platform design system called Thomas inside Figma with separate token and component files, a federated committee, and governance that… | ||
| Live design critique with the Figma design team | Noah Levin, Sara Culver, Kelly Li | 31m |
Team runs a live design critique inside FigJam on onboarding, using stickies, stamps and reactions, Figma audio and cursor chat while about ten people join the… | ||
| Hitting Ctrl+N: How to work through a design breakup | Shanique Shields | 23m |
A legacy purchase orders revamp gets designed in Figma, tested in 15 usability studies, and shipped to 80% of merchants after 1.5 years, then gets rolled back… | ||
| Race and recess: Design tools for reducing inequities | Neby Teklu, Michelle Molitor | 27m |
Claims a concrete workflow: apply the Equity by Design toolkit to adtech for education (Summit Learning Platform used in ~350 schools) by start with self… | ||
| Low fidelity design: A guide to making your design process inclusive | Daniel Sauble | 23m |
Claim: using low fidelity artifacts makes the design process measurably more inclusive by getting stakeholders, users, and engineers to engage earlier… | ||
| Building Sticker Sheets to scale design systems | Angela Garcia, Santiago Carmago | 20m |
A concrete playbook: migrate messy Sketch files into Figma by first running an inventory (found 21 colors 39 typefaces 280 symbols 143 components), then… | ||
| Playing with Plugins | Jordan Singer | 25m |
Shows concrete experiments and working plugins: Time Machine (published) saves versioned selections, Live Preview generates QR codes and became an iOS… | ||
| Rapid prototype testing | Christa Simon, Heather Tompkins | 25m |
Team rapidly prototypes Figma audio, running six sessions in one day (30‑minute tests + 15‑minute debriefs) and moves into a closed beta; iterations use Figma… | ||
| The universal challenges of every scaling design team | David Hoang | 27m |
Defines hypergrowth as >40% CAGR and gives concrete cases: Webflow plans 125% team growth this year and One Medical jumps 4→14 designers (≈250%), so priorities… | ||
| Bringing truth to Figma | Matt Rosenzweig | 29m |
Examines an audit workflow that turns production CSS and tokens into matching Figma assets by comparing hex values, media queries, and component props to what… | ||
| Designing typefaces with Figma components and plugins | Shana Hu | 22m |
Claim: it's possible to design usable line‑based typefaces inside Figma by treating each glyph as a component and automating spacing with a plugin. The demo… | ||
| Figm-illustrations | Joey Lamelas | 22m |
Step‑by‑step builds a detailed Kirby vector in Figma from a traced reference: uses the pen tool and adjusted ellipses for shapes, organizes with strict naming… | ||
| Tending the garden: Headspace team culture | Frank Bach | 29m |
Headspace Product Design claims it keeps the team mindful and productive by mandating 15‑minute daily meditation across the company and scheduling MinDays… | ||
| Building a platform at Figma | Bersabel Tadesse | 19m |
A product team decides to build an extensibility platform for Figma with four nonnegotiable principles: security and fine‑grained permissions, stability… | ||
| When design meets machine learning | Lalo Martínez | 25m |
Design creates interfaces that feed ML actionable signals and offers four practical principles: explicitness frequency specificity consistency. Quora’s… | ||
| #FigmaAndChill, a catalyst to connection, community, & culture | Hope Atina, Aladrian Goods, Storyboard Dee, Valerie Phoenix | 24m |
BIPOC designers use Clubhouse plus Figma to convene live, teach by doing, and ship shareable art: a Black Power Ranger, a Hotep snowman, an ArchAndroid… | ||
| Day 2 Closing Keynote - Turning adversity into impact | Dantley Davis | 13m |
Remarks list concrete claims and artifacts: childhood modding and tools (Photoshop Illustrator 3D Studio HTML CSS JavaScript), a product pivot that pushes… | ||
| nothing matches | ||