Are We All Just Figma Operators Now?

It brought me back to the start of my career, at the turn of the millennium and the tail end of the first internet bubble.

Back then, there wasn’t really a digital design industry as we now understand it. You were either a developer figuring out how to make things look vaguely decent in code, or a print designer wrestling with how your meticulously laid-out pages rendered (or more often didn’t) in Netscape Navigator.

Because dedicated UI tools didn’t yet exist, we cobbled together our workflows using whatever software we could get our hands on—Photoshop, Freehand, Fireworks, Dreamweaver. The dominant force in the space was Adobe, and once a year they’d roll into town, hire out a big venue, and show off their new features.

These were less educational gatherings and more elaborate sales pitches: a flurry of layer styles, gradient maps, and vector masks dangled in front of a room of eager creatives, hoping to convince at least a few of us to buy the next upgrade.

And you know what? It worked. Because in those early days, success often came down to who could master the tools better and faster. So, we dutifully attended the roadshows, learnt about the latest gel button trends, installed whatever Kai’s Power Tools plug-in pack was hot that year, and tried to stay ahead of the curve.

When Design Became More Than Pixels

But that phase didn’t last.

Over time, the industry matured. We began to understand that good digital design wasn’t about glossy visuals, but about solving problems. We started doing user research, running discovery workshops, building information architectures, and sketching out lo-fi prototypes before ever touching a screen.

We embraced usability, human-centred design, and the idea that products should work for users, not just on them.

This gave rise to a new kind of designer—the UX designer—who spent as much time in spreadsheets, sticky notes and usability labs as they did in design tools. A designer whose primary output might be a user journey map or a sitemap rather than a hi-res mockup.

For a time, the most interesting work in the industry was happening far away from the tools themselves.

The Indie Conference Boom

And with this shift came a renaissance in our community.

Indie conferences began to spring up—events that weren’t about software, but about ideas. No vendor pitches, no roadmaps. Just designers sharing stories, swapping techniques, and collectively moving the practice forward.

Every major city had its own event. Agencies ran their own conferences. For a golden moment, it felt like we were shaping the future of the web together.

But that moment, too, passed.

The Rise of Systems Thinking and Design Teams

As digital products grew more complex, so did the teams building them. Startups became scale-ups. Design matured from a scrappy necessity to a core function.

Agile transformed the way we worked, breaking monolithic projects into bite-sized stories delivered by cross-functional teams. The days of crafting entire experiences as a single designer gave way to owning a slice of functionality—sometimes as small as a single form field or a microinteraction.

Design systems emerged to maintain consistency and scale. Adobe, slow to respond, was supplanted by a new generation of tools built for this modular world.

Figma led the charge—not just as a design tool, but as a collaboration platform that promised to make design as seamless and distributed as code.

Welcome to the Figma Era

And with that, something else shifted.

The centre of gravity in the design world began to tilt once more—away from methods and mindsets, back toward the tools.

Indie conferences waned. Community events shrank. And in their place rose Config—Figma’s flagship conference. Thousands of designers now flock there not to explore the edges of the craft, but to see the new auto-layout features, hear about AI-assisted design tools, and learn how to best integrate variables into their component libraries.

Let’s be clear: none of this is bad. Figma is a fantastic tool. It’s revolutionised how teams collaborate, accelerated the pace of product development, and lowered the barrier to entry for new designers.

But it’s also reshaping the identity of our profession.

When the bulk of your time is spent assembling pre-built components in Figma, are you still a designer?

Or are you something else—an operator, a systems integrator, a layout technician?

Déjà Vu and the Danger of Comfort

We’re in a moment of déjà vu. Just like the Adobe roadshows of old, we’re once again gathering to celebrate tools over technique, features over fundamentals.

And just like then, there’s a risk that we mistake proficiency with the tool for mastery of the craft.

Design has always been bigger than the tools we use. It’s about curiosity, empathy, systems thinking, experimentation. Figma is just one stop on the journey—not the destination.

What Kind of Designer Do You Want to Be?

So, are we all just Figma operators now?

Maybe. But we don’t have to be.

Let’s remember that design happens before Figma. It happens in conversations, in whiteboards, in research reports, in back-of-the-napkin sketches. It happens when we ask better questions, not just when we deliver better screens.

If history has taught us anything, it’s that the pendulum always swings.

And when it does, the next renaissance won’t be ushered in by a tool, but by a question:

“What kind of designer do I want to be?”