Design News
You can refine projects with AI, but what about designing them from scratch?
AI and Figma
It seems like there isn't much artificial intelligence can't (attempt) to do for you. From detailing what takes place within your meetings to helping you get organized at work, there are endless new applications, programs and platforms that can help your workload feel a little bit lighter. But what about AI for creative pursuits, or pitching your design work and ideas to a potential client?
I recently wanted to update my resume's visual design, and wound up on Figma, an online tool for designing, prototyping and developing digital projects. Unsurprisingly, Figma has jumped into the AI game. In June, Figma rolled out AI features that included Make Designs, Find Assets and Designs, Rename Layers and Make Prototypes, plus features like adding realistic text, translating language, adjusting copy tone, removing backgrounds and more. Most of these features are available in beta right now.
Make Designs was one of the features that launched at Config, Figma's annual design conference. It allows you to transform ideas into editable designs in a couple of minutes by using a text prompt. According to Figma, "this helps you explore a wider range of design possibilities and iterations quickly, and reduces the amount of effort needed to manually create early explorations from scratch" -- and, in my case, design a resume. Right?
Figma Issues
Unfortunately, when I actually tried to use it, it turned out that Make Designs is temporarily unavailable due to an issue caused by the underlying design system problem, and has been pulled from the site. Figma said it's "holding off on reenabling Make Designs while we work through an improved QA process," but it's not clear when Make Designs will relaunch to the public.
Thankfully, Figma has laid out a visual step-by-step breakdown of the tool on its website, so you can still check out the product and understand its initial intent. This includes how the tool works, how to customize a design once created and tips for making the most of its features.
Figma's Other AI Features
While I turned to Figma AI solely for designing a resume, I can't deny that some of its other AI features are a great asset when designing something that contains infographics, images and text, like a resume. In place of Make Designs, the following Figma features can be implemented into an existing resume design. Figma's AI features are all currently free for current Figma users while it's in beta, though there may be usage limits, and there may be an added cost once fully available.
- Prototype your static design: You can turn any static design into an interactive prototype, which allows you to connect portions of your resume design -- or professional pitch deck -- into a cohesive, unified design.
- Rename layers automatically: You can contextually rename any of your layers in a design to keep things organized and compiled. So if you're trying to keep your visual design separate from your resume text so you can swap in and out what it says, this is a great tool to have.
- Generate content and titles: You can generate and replace text directly into your design mockups to remove the standard placeholder "lorem ipsum," and bring focus to what you are designing. Let's say you drop some digital drawings into your resume that you want to place later. Here you can label them and come back with ease.
- Instantly remove backgrounds: You can remove image backgrounds with a single click, while isolating your subject. This is to replace manual lassoing and erasing, making it a faster process.
- Edit, rewrite, and translate text within your design: Like many other AI platforms, Figma AI allows you to adjust the length and tone of your copy, or translate it into another language. The significance here is that this can take place within your designs. Again, this is another time management tool in the design process -- or in addition to it.
Should You Use Figma AI?
Considering the detailed approach Figma supplied on its website to highlight Make Designs, it seems to be a great tool to make a resume or any professional portfolio. Or it could be, when you can access it. Currently, you can't use Figma AI to make a design -- you can only input a design you already have. And with many AI platforms popping up solely focused on resume building like Rezi, Designs.ai and Teal, I can understand why someone may not turn to Figma AI when the time comes.
I'm eager to give it a chance since it's a product with ample design features that give you more creative freedom than resume builders focused on efficiency and pace rather than aesthetics. Fingers crossed it'll find its way back into Figma AI's platform before the end of the year. And if you're looking to create a design using generative AI right now, give Midjourney, Dall-E 3 or Adobe Firefly a try.
author Carly Quellman