Figma co-founder, Dylan Field is clearly a gigantic fan of Enron – or rather him powered by cryptocurrencies a semi-parodic revival of the company that appeared online earlier this week.
Dressed in an oversized Enron hoodie during a conversation with WIRED editor Steven Levy at Tuesday’s The Gigantic Interview event in San Francisco, Field said he had always been a fan of the Enron logo, which was the last logo created by the legendary American graphic designer Paul Randthe renowned logos of ABC, IBM, UPS and Westinghouse. But he said he also “got a real kick” about Enron potentially restarting operations, which it did he was tied ‘The Birds Aren’t Real’ creator Connor Gaydos. As someone who was just 9 years elderly when Enron collapsed in 2001, Field says he wonders (optimistically, it seems) whether it’s possible to build a up-to-date company on a tainted brand, given that his generation may not carry this kind of baggage associated with company’s failures that others do it.
Either way, it seems to be a question of strength of design, which Field and Levy focused on more broadly during the conversation, talking not only about the creation and evolution of the Figma platform, but also where the co-founder sees the company going in the near future.
Field says the company currently has “millions” of users, with a third coming from the design world, a third from the programming world, and a third from various other backgrounds. With Figma, he says, brands and companies can express themselves visually much better than ever before, working together to more quickly understand what’s possible graphically, what the best user experience is, and how to best stand out in the marketplace.
But in an age when artificial intelligence can make most things look at least relatively good, Levy asked, how can companies using Figma stand out? Field says the answer is not to simply leave the floor to meet with emerging designers and developers, as has already been achieved with artificial intelligence work, but to “raise the ceiling” to facilitate quite good designers and developers work beyond their existing limitations of their skills.
The best designers, Field says, have a unique ability to manipulate interactivity, dynamism, movement and UX to create work that few others can match. He hopes that with AI tools like the ones Figma has or will integrate, more people will be “limited more by their ideas than by the tools in front of them,” ideally giving them the chance to match the work of some of the best designers in the world.
While Field acknowledged that good design can facilitate bad actors, citing a particularly well-designed magazine that ISIS published around 2014 or 2015 as an extreme utilize case, he argues that all tools have the power to lift people up if done correctly.
“Most AI tools today are about lowering the floor,” Field reiterated. “They want to democratize and that’s great in many ways, for example you talk to people who generate images using diffusion models and some of them do art therapy, which has never been possible before.” However, he added that it was significant to raise the ceiling. “The main focus at this point is what we think,” he said, “and hopefully we can move in that direction.”
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