Issue no.5: Come together
On the long road from idea to reality, finding your footing means finding your people.
Share Issue no.5: Come together
Hero illustration by Thomas Colligan
Progress often hinges on an unexpected email, a tough-love mentor, or a late-night conversation that snaps everything into place. Without community, we’d all be stuck at square one. As our annual Config conference approaches, we’re amplifying the creators, builders, and thinkers shaping our journey—some of whom you’ll find on the agenda. Whether IRL or through a URL, we invite you to make a connection.
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How to make magic
As a self-professed Figma fan, product manager Charmaine Lee isn’t afraid to roll up her sleeves and jump in the file. Building Lens Studio at Snap AR, she believes this all-hands-on-deck approach is what makes a creator tool feel like magic. Here are her rules for product building that are anything but by the book.
Craft and beauty
Speaking of experiences that feel like magic, how do you define craft and beauty? How do you measure quality at all—nevermind its impact? In this conversation, Katie Dill, Head of Design at Stripe; Karri Saarinen, co-founder and CEO of Linear; and Yukhi Yamashita, Chief Product Officer at Figma, describe the indescribable.
The modern quilter
When former product designer Nicole Boettcher started crafting quilts, she reached for the tool she knew best: Figma. We visited her Brooklyn studio to see how she designs and plans each piece in the file. “Designers like to joke that our job is moving rectangles, so in some ways my life has not changed very much,” jokes Nicole, who’s joining the virtual program at Config.
The role of AI
How will AI change our tools and workflows, and what does that mean for us as designers and builders? David Hoang, former Vice President of Marketing and Design at Replit, visited the New York office to talk shop about navigating change. His advice? Stick together. “There’s a feeling of being in a cohort; a balance of accountability and fun,” he says. “That’s going to be what continues the motivation to learn.”
Rabbit hole
1. In-person Config tickets are sold out, but you can still snag a virtual spot or make some new friends at a watch party near you!
2. Bookmark the live blog and follow along for speaker highlights, #confits, and more.
3. Get hyped—the header and footer art in this issue was done by illustrator Thomas Colligan, who also designed new swag debuting at Config and hitting the Figma Store on June 27.
The last word
