Config Day 1 – Sites, Make, and the Future We’re (Almost) Ready For
A deep dive into what was announced — and what it really means.
Hello people and Configmates, in this issue, we’ll look at…
🌊 The Wave,
🧑🔧 The Fix,
✏️ The Draw,
📢 The Buzz,
🖥️ The Sites,
🧑💻 The Make,
📱 The Apps,
🍟 and extra things to bite it…
🌊 The Wave
Before anything else, I want to thank everyone who took part in the wave. If you don’t know what I’m talking about — just wait. The video from my Ray-Ban Meta View is here.
If you were at Config 2024, you probably remember the crowd wave (or “ola” as we say in Portuguese 🇧🇷) I kicked off. It became my unofficial-official Config role.
This year, I got ambitious. I wanted to stretch the wave from one end of the room to the other. Moscone is huge, so the dream is still alive. But when the announcements dropped, it wasn’t a wave anymore — it was a tsunami 🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊.
A marolinha of feature drops turned into a full-blown flood of "WHAT!?" moments. People were amazed. Some updates felt like pure innovation. Others? Shameless, beautiful copy-paste from the competition. And And I loved every second of it — Figma made all the competitors bleed on Day One.
Let me pause here: in Brazilian surfer slang, marola is already a small wave. Marolinha? That’s an even smaller ripple — barely a pulse in the ocean. Great for beginners. But Figma? It sent a wall of water crashing through Moscone. From calm to chaos in one product keynote.
Let's ride that wave, section by section.
🧑🔧 The Fix
If you've been reading my newsletter for a while, you already know how I feel about Auto Layout. It’s great — but it was missing the fundamentals to truly behave like HTML/CSS. For Figma to reach that magical "Publish" button moment, we needed these foundations in place before launching Figma Sites.
That moment has finally arrived.
There were several small but meaningful updates implemented by Figma to support this moment.
But the real breakthrough? Grids.
Figma introduced support for CSS-like grids, a major shift that brings us closer to designing real, semantic layouts — not just stacking things in nice containers. If you haven’t read it yet, Christine Vallaure’s article breaks it down beautifully. It’s the best explanation I’ve seen since Config.
Designers: if you want respect from developers, learn CSS and JavaScript. I mean it. Understanding layout systems makes you a better designer and a better collaborator.
Knowledge is power — and it might even turn you into a 🤓 nerd like me.
Let me say it louder: Auto Layout is inspired by Flexbox — but it's not quite there yet.
Yes, it now supports features like gap and "Fill container" (which mimics flex-grow: 1), flex-wrap, so elements can wrap to the next line naturally, alignment tools that resemble justify-content and align-items. However, there are still some limitations to be aware of.
That said, we're getting closer.
Now that Grid is in the game, I hope we break free from designing the same “bento-style” layouts over and over. Let’s break the grid. Let’s explore the weird edges of layout again.
This update isn’t just technical — it’s cultural. Figma is nudging us to design like developers without taking away our visual playground 🛝. The gap is closing.
✏ The Draw
Let’s talk about Draw — the quiet, almost poetic feature drop that gave me a hit of nostalgia.
Figma didn’t just launch a new tool. It summoned the spirit of Macromedia Freehand. 🕊️
For the younger crowd: Freehand was one of the best vector tools of its time. Before Adobe bought and buried it, Freehand was beloved for its freedom, its fluidity — especially by designers who built websites before the rise of Illustrator. I was one of them. It had soul.
With Draw, Figma brings that kind of soul back.
You stay in the same interface, toggle into Draw mode, and suddenly you’re sketching with vectors — directly into your design. No exporting. No weird Illustrator copy-paste issues. Just pure expression.
It’s not a small feature — it’s a special one in the Figma ecosystem, and it has massive potential.
Think about how Helena draws hearts in Figma — or how the designers at Font Awesome created over 30,000 icons. They used Figma to do it — even with limitations. Now imagine the future, when Draw becomes a native superpower fully unleashed within the ecosystem. Draw lets us refine, tweak, and explore that same depth — with both power and performance built in.
Clunky icon workarounds? Say goodbye. 👋
Draw feels like a creative reincarnation — a 🤘 gentle rebellion against sterile systems, reminding us that even in the most advanced design tools, everything starts with a human hand and an imperfect line.
Now imagine having all your illustrations — the ones you’ll actually use on your website — created and managed in the same environment, ready to be turned into components with just a few clicks. That’s not just convenient — that’s powerful.
📢 The Buzz
Figma Buzz is definitely catching up with 🦘 Canva — a platform where small businesses and marketers solve day-to-day challenges for creating marketing assets. Having something similar inside Figma is fantastic. But let’s be honest: it wasn’t quite ready for Canva Create announcements just weeks earlier.
👍 The advantages
First, bringing familiar features like Variants and Multi-Edit — already native to Figma — was a smart move. These are exactly what high-velocity teams need. You can now switch components faster, edit in bulk, and work without breaking the content panel. It’s the kind of quality-of-life upgrade that adds up fast.
Another big win? Templates that marketing teams can use to change only the content — without touching or messing up the approved layouts. That keeps design integrity intact while empowering non-designers.
Also, having all assets in one place — ready to collaborate, review, and export — is a huge boost for creative workflows.
And importing data through a CSV or spreadsheet? It works. Not as elegantly as Canva’s solution, but it gets the job done (for now).
👎 The disadvantages
If you’ve used Canva’s Brand Kit or Adobe Libraries, you know how powerful it is to have quick access to all your brand elements — logos, colors, fonts, images, and video — in one centralized space. That’s the level of experience Figma Buzz is aiming for.
Figma is finally moving in that direction, but when it comes to media asset management (especially images and video), Canva is more prepared — at this moment. That said, I truly believe this is the next area where Figma Buzz will evolve.
At my previous role at OnChain Studios, we managed over 2,000 image assets for brands like Disney, Mattel, StarWars, Nascar, and the NBA. When a designer uses the wrong image, it’s more than a mistake — it can cost you a partnership. That’s why having a proper brand asset system inside Figma will be a game-changer.
📁 I’ll share soon how I tackled this DesignOps challenge in my portfolio.
🔗 Connected Data
This might be the feature with the most long-term potential.
Imagine linking real product data — like images, names, and prices — directly from a source like Airtable or Google Sheets into your Figma components. Canva already nailed this with the launch of Canva Sheets, letting users manage spreadsheets and even upload images into rows — just like Airtable.
Figma’s take on connected data feels promising, but it’s still early. Right now, working with CSVs feels a bit too “Microsoft Excel 2006.” The experience isn’t dynamic or visual enough yet. Think: Airtable meets Figma Variables — that’s the direction it needs to go.
Also: Lauren McCann will thank you when she no longer has to wrestle with files like speakers-config-2025_v1 (1).csv during late-night updates. You know exactly what I mean. 😅
And speaking of CSVs: linking photos wasn’t very clear. Do they need to be hosted externally? Can they be uploaded to Figma? It’s still confusing. A more elegant Airtable-like approach — where you can upload images directly into the spreadsheet or tie them to a component — would make a huge difference.
Ideally, we’ll soon have a shared online database that powers presentations, marketing assets, and websites — all managed directly inside Figma.
💭 That’s the dream. And we’re getting close.
🖥️ The Sites
— Figma, have you no shame on your face?
— No. Just beauty. 😘
🔍 Tech Vibes from SF to Config
When I landed in San Francisco from Atlanta, I was hit by a wall of tech advertising. But what stood out most? Framer. Their ads were everywhere — almost as if they knew what Figma was about to unveil.
🍎 And the leaks? Classic Apple-style. Figma Sites news was already jumping from one LinkedIn post to another. It felt like the hype had already spoiled the reveal. But when it finally happened, it still hit.
😎 Figma’s Coming-of-Age Moment
Figma is like that 👨🎤 young, rebellious, and charming friend who makes even 👴 old guys like me feel young again. It’s giving us permission to ship, build, and play again.
Yes, Figma is still in its pre-teen phase — a little unsure of what it wants to be. But Figma Sites is a bold move, and it’s exciting to witness.
💻 Desktop-First Is the Reality
Let’s settle this: mobile-first is an outdated mantra. I’ve designed financial platforms that were desktop-only, and fitness apps that were mobile-only. What matters is user context — not buzzwords.
Figma Sites embracing desktop-first just reflects how most people design. And while Framer nailed the desktop-to-mobile cascade, I still dislike their unfamiliar Auto Layout labels — it’s a relearn process for no good reason.
🧠 From Idea Graveyard to Site Builder
I’ve lost count of how many ideas died waiting on a dev. But that changed when I found Wix Studio. In the past year alone, I’ve built 50+ websites — not just for me, but for DOJO+ clients who needed control over their daily operations.
One dream that became real? Free Museum. It started as a mental note and now lives online — thanks to Wix. I might even switch to Figma Sites if Dylan wants to be a patron. 😉
🕸️ A Site is More Than a Site
Let’s talk about scale — because Figma Sites isn’t just entering a playground, it’s entering a battlefield. ⚔️
WordPress still dominates the landscape. It powers an estimated 43.5% of all websites, totaling over 529 million globally. That kind of reach is massive. And when you compare it to tools like Webflow (which sits at around 1.24%) or Squarespace and others that hover below 1%, it becomes clear: Figma is playing catch-up in numbers, but not in culture.
WordPress earned its dominance by being flexible and open — but it also became messy. It’s a developer-first platform that can do just about anything, but often at the cost of usability. That’s fine for developers, but for writers, marketers, or indie creators, it often becomes overwhelming.
Figma Sites can change that balance. It doesn’t need to own the internet like WordPress — it just needs to own the way we design for it. 😍 It already owns the hearts of designers. Now, if it can give us the power to ship without compromise, it’s game over.
We’re not just talking about launching portfolios. We’re talking about redefining what it means to build online — with less code, less dependency, and way more freedom.
🪟 Less Customization, More Control?
Let’s be honest — most people don’t want to customize everything. They just want to publish, connect, and maybe collect emails. But even that can feel like a maze.
Take WordPress: if you want to collect emails, you need a plugin. Want analytics? Another plugin. Want it to load fast and not break? Better get another plugin for that too.
Medium, on the other hand, feels like Apple. Polished, elegant, and walled off. It’s a joy to write on, but it doesn’t let you own your audience. No direct access to emails, no flexibility. You’re playing in someone else’s sandbox.
That’s why I personally lean toward Substack. It gives me ownership — I get my audience and my list. But even there, customization is limited. You can’t really change the design or layout. Ghost is another interesting option, especially if you’re self-hosting. But again, it’s not for everyone.
The truth is, most people don’t create content — they consume it. And platforms like Medium and Substack are built beautifully for that. But once you want to build something with a personal touch — your own branding, layout, and vibe — limitations show up quickly. That’s when creators start bumping against the guardrails of Medium, Substack, and similar platforms.
Despite its reach, WordPress hasn’t kept pace with evolving user needs. It got too comfortable at the top, and unless it rethinks its usability, it risks becoming a relic rather than a leader.
🎨 More Customization, More Power (but More Work)
When you do want to go deeper — brand it your way, tweak the layout, make it feel truly yours — then we’re talking about the big leagues: Webflow, Wix Studio, Squarespace (cute but shallow), and maybe soon… Figma Sites.
These tools let you customize everything: styles, components, interactivity, and even how things scale. But once you go this route, you’re also stepping into more complexity. That’s not bad — it’s just the tradeoff.
And when you move beyond static sites into real functionality — things like e-commerce, CRMs, and lead funnels — it’s a different conversation. Platforms like Hubspot, ClickFunnels, HighLevel, ActiveCampaign, and Mailchimp still dominate because they’re built for performance and tracking.
In e-commerce, Shopify is still king 👑, and in Latin America, local giants like VTEX (which powers Walmart and other massive players) are hard to beat.
Figma Sites? It’s not ready for all of that yet. But it doesn’t have to be — not right away. What it can do is set the new standard for design-first publishing, with a roadmap that welcomes integrations, plug-ins, and developer support over time.
🔧 Improvements I’d Love to See
As promising as Figma Sites is, there are still a few things I hope the team prioritizes next:
🍝 Menu navigation that scales. No one demoed this, but it’s key. I want to link pages without creating a spaghetti bowl of connections. Framer already handles this more gracefully.
🔁 Smarter overrides: Edits in Figma Sites don’t sync back to the Design System. That might seem minor now, but over time it can create inconsistencies and break your source of truth. Right now, it feels more like a !important override than a true integration.
🔌 Embed widgets and tools. Calendars, forms, and scripts should be easy to drop in — not duct-taped together.
🍪 Cookie consent and analytics. We need native, flexible ways to handle cookie banners and send clean user data into Google Tag Manager (GTM).
📈 Conversion tracking. Ideally, designers should be able to implement things like Meta’s Conversion API or Google Ads tracking without calling in dev backup.
✅ Final Thoughts about Sites
Figma Sites isn’t just another builder. It’s a new workflow. A bridge between design and deployment. It collapses the gap between what we imagine and what goes live — and that’s huge.
Is it perfect yet? No. But it’s already good enough to build with. And that’s the whole point.
Even I’m planning a new portfolio. Not because I have to — but because this feels fun again. That’s the signal we’ve been waiting for.
No more mockups collecting dust. No more “someday” ideas stuck in Figma files.
Let’s ship. 🚀
🌍 All the Websites in the World
Figma doesn’t need to own all the websites in the world. It already owns something bigger: the way we design them. 🫶
And honestly? That’s more powerful.
I don’t want to see designers walking into meetings pitching Figma Sites as a one-size-fits-all solution. That’s how you lose trust fast. My message to Figma lovers (like me): understand what the tools are for — and when to use them. Overselling Figma Sites without understanding the full context of a company’s stack, workflow, and business logic can make you come off as naive or junior. Figma doesn’t need to be everything. It just needs to make everything easier to design and hand off — wherever it ships.
Designers have already made Figma the creative source of truth. Now, instead of trying to dominate publishing, Figma should double down on making it effortless to design once and ship anywhere — whether that’s inside Sites or other platforms.
This is where ‹div›RIOTS comes in.
I had the chance to speak with their CEO and see a demo of figma.to.website. It’s powerful — but limited in scope. Rather than trying to be a builder, ‹div›RIOTS has a bigger opportunity: become the bridge between Figma and the platforms where other companies run their business. Imagine:
figma.to.wordpress
figma.to.elementor
figma.to.webflow
figma.to.wixstudio
figma.to.squarespace
figma.to.godaddy
figma.to.shopify
figma.to.woocommerce
figma.to.vtex
If they build this right — and if Figma sees the value, maybe even bringing them into the Figma Ventures family like LottieFiles — the exit strategy writes itself.
And I’m not daydreaming. Figma has already shown signs — just look at their investment in Replo, a tool that lets you send Figma designs straight to Shopify.
Georges Gomes, if you’re reading this — I’ve already mapped out some core Design System foundations for Wix Studio, Squarespace, and other CMS platforms. Let’s connect. This is a wave worth riding.
My challenge to ‹div›RIOTS? Turn this into a full system. Think Setapp style: one bundle subscription, multiple integrations, access to every platform designers use — all while keeping Figma as the single source of truth.
💽 The Database
If you’ve ever built content structures in WordPress, you know it’s plugin city. Creating custom post types and managing structured content always feels like a workaround — not native.
Then Canva came along with a better answer: Canva Sheets. A true central database that powers all of Canva’s surfaces — from websites to presentations to social media. It’s seamless, visual, and fully integrated. Just elegant. 🎩
Figma needs this.
Right now, using Variables or importing CSVs feels like trying to teach Excel to speak design. The workflow is outdated, clunky, and leaves marketing teams struggling to stay synced with designers.
What we need is a connected, visual database that powers everything across the Figma ecosystem:
Figma Sites 🖥️
Figma Slides (aka Flides) 📊
Figma Buzz 📢
Figma Draw ✏️
Imagine editing a product name once and having it update across your entire design system — landing pages, decks, social assets — without copy-pasting or version confusion. Just like Canva or Airtable.
If Figma embraced this logic, Variables could work like true references — not just static tokens. Designers, marketers, and even PMs could confidently make updates, all within a controlled and visual interface. And once this foundation is in place, using data across different files — like local or global Variables — becomes much easier and more consistent across the ecosystem.
Airtable offers views like Wix CMS — making it more customizable and easier to use — and even allows embedding media (images and videos) directly in each row, just like Wix CMS. It’s a powerful model that Figma could learn copy from.
💡 Bonus idea? Let us sync it with Airtable for now. Let us build with what we already know.
🧪 CodeLayers
If Figma Sites is serious about scaling into real production workflows — especially for React or Tailwind-based teams — CodeLayers is a project worth keeping an eye on.
They’re exploring how to bridge the gap between design and development inside Figma, which could be a game-changer. It’s still early, but the idea of writing real, structured code without leaving the design environment is promising.
Not sure how far they’ll take it — but if it works, it could open the door to a whole new class of product builders.
I’m curious to see where this goes.
🔌 The Plugins
Figma has done an incredible job nurturing its design community — just like WordPress once did for developers. But here’s the difference:
WordPress always tiptoed around plugin devs. It was careful not to kill off its ecosystem by absorbing too much into core features. Figma, on the other hand? It’s not afraid to absorb, replicate, or replace. And honestly, I respect that.
Even if it means some plugin developers get steamrolled along the way. 🪦
We’ve already seen this in action:
✅ Contrast checkers (accessibility plugins)
✅ Arc text tools
✅ Rename layers
✅ Background removal
✅ Annotation tools
✅ AI-powered image generation and upscaling
All these categories were once plugin-first. Now? They’re built into Figma — and often better than the original.
And that’s how it should be. If Figma wants to evolve, it can’t rely on external tools to solve foundational problems. Otherwise, it risks becoming WordPress — where you still need plugins like ACF just to build a decent database.
The rule of Big Tech still applies: if we don’t buy it, we build it. So if you’re a company backed by Figma Ventures (or Dylan himself), congrats — you’re probably safe. The rest? Brace yourself.
☠️ Tokens Studio for Figma might be next on Figma’s “we’ll take it from here” list. It’s a powerful plugin — no doubt — but I’m not a fan of storing sensitive design system data outside the Figma ecosystem. And let’s be honest… it’s only a matter of time before Figma builds all those features natively.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Figma launches an official Extensions or Plugin Marketplace next year. Especially with Sites, Buzz, and Slides expanding, there’s more space than ever to build on top.
🎞️ Why LottieFiles Will Survive (and Thrive)
Not every plugin will make it — but LottieFiles is in a strong position to not just survive, but become core to Figma’s future.
Why? Because it solves a real gap: microinteractions and motion. Adobe tried to tackle this in XD, but their implementation felt clunky and half-baked. Figma, with its cleaner UI and modular interface, is much better positioned to pull it off — and LottieFiles is already part of the Figma Ventures portfolio.
That means they’re not outsiders — they’re insiders. Almost like a Trojan horse 🎠, quietly positioned to observe and learn from the competition in the site builder space.
LottieFiles brings a wealth of experience with timeline-based animation, and if Figma integrates it fully, we could finally get:
A native animation mode via the bottom toggle (just like switching to Draw, Prototype or Dev Mode)
Timeline-style controls for easing, motion states, and sequencing in component level
Built-in support for audio and even haptic feedback triggers
This would be a game-changer — not just for fancy UI polish, but for building truly interactive design systems. It’s motion at the system level, baked into components, and ready to hand off to devs with clean code.
So no, LottieFiles isn’t getting killed. It’s getting promoted.
🧑💻 The Make
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got came from one of the founders of Bondfaro, back when we worked together in Rio de Janeiro:
Juno, if you can’t explain what you want in clear and concise Portuguese, we’re not going to be able to code it. Code is a logical language — what you want must be clearly written.
🧠 That stuck with me.
Which brings us to Figma Make — the AI-powered assistant that aims to remix your design intent into functional output. But here’s the truth: more than being polite to AI (like we saw in the demo), you need to be clear. Requirements matter. Logic matters. The better you define, the better Make delivers.
The real superpower behind Make is that it already has access to your design metadata — your naming conventions, your styles, your components, and even your design system. That context gives it a huge head start compared to any external AI tool. And every time you rename a layer? You’re training the model. Every constraint you apply? You're shaping the logic engine (I believe). It’s almost like Facebook’s '10-Year Challenge' — every small action, like renaming a layer, helps train the model behind the scenes. Except here, it’s about design logic, not facial recognition.
This is what will eventually crush tools like Lovable and other AI design startups — because Figma is where designers already live, breathe, and ship. The context is richer. The workflows are tighter. And the vibe? All Figma.
WHEN VIBE CODING MEETS VIBE DESIGN ⚡
🌿 Version Control & Going Beyond Toys
Here’s where things get real.
Designers still struggle with concepts like branching and merging — even in companies using Enterprise Figma. But when you're working with Sites + Make, you're stepping into a different arena. This isn’t just a sandbox anymore. You’re now dealing with product-level complexity: bugs, handoffs, rollbacks, and all the messy realities of real production.
And while Figma’s current versioning system is fine for simple work, it doesn’t scale well for full applications. We need better workflows to:
Track changes
Test iterations
Roll back mistakes
Work in parallel without chaos
At the Enterprise level, some of this can be managed inside Figma. But once a project leaves the safe space of mockups and enters the world of live builds, developers and companies need proper version control — not only for design files but for code too. That means GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or similar tools to maintain structure, ship confidently, and collaborate at scale.
Right now, Figma Sites + Make still feel experimental — more like digital toys than production tools. But if we want to build real products that solve real problems, we’ll need to leave the playground behind. Let’s build real things, with real impact.
📱Figma App(s)
It’s becoming increasingly clear: Figma doesn’t just need to improve its mobile app — it may need a full mobile strategy.
Each product has its own potential, but also its own mobile gaps:
Draw should rival Procreate in creativity and smoothness.
FigJam should aim to surpass tools like Miro and Freeform, especially for mind maps and collaborative sketching.
Buzz needs to deliver a Canva-like experience on mobile: fast, clean, and intuitive.
And all of this needs to run flawlessly — smooth performance, offline capabilities, and reliable sync.
📌 Quick side note: my wife created three books using just Procreate and Canva — no AI, just raw talent. She’s a total rockstar (and yes, way better than me). You can find them on Amazon.
🍟 BITes
🇧🇷 Figma is opening an office in Brazil — and I’m truly excited for what’s ahead. Wishing all the best to the amazing team I met during Config: Débora Mioranzza, Silvio Freire, and Leandro Rosarin. I’m more than happy to support and contribute to the local community however I can. Now I just hope Figma starts localizing its pricing strategy — like Adobe, Canva, and Wix — by charging in Brazilian Reais. It would make life so much easier for everyone there.
🏛️ Want to explore San Francisco without spending a dime? Check out Free Museum — a side project I launched right before Config. It lists all the free museum days in SF, and I’m already working to expand it to other cities like London. Got a favorite museum story? Send it my way — I’d love to feature it!
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Juno
Designer, writer, educator, UX/UI Design advocate, and mentor for startups.
