Figma Just Changed the Game

Just two days after I published my first article, Figma decided to flip the creative world on its head. At Config 2025, they introduced four groundbreaking tools — Figma Sites, Make, Buzz, and Draw — that blur the lines between design, development, and deployment.

And while most media coverage is (rightfully) focused on how this challenges Adobe, WordPress, and Canva — I want to take a moment to reflect on what this actually means for people like me.

I’m a Computer Science student, and Figma has been a huge part of how I think. From university assignments to hackathons, side projects, and personal experiments — Figma has always been where my ideas first took shape. But until now, there was always a ceiling — a limit to how far I could go within the tool before I had to switch over to code, to hosting, to whatever platform would make it real.

Not anymore.

Figma Sites: From Prototype to Production in One Tab

If you’ve ever built a front-end project — especially under time pressure — you’ll know the pain of translation. You design something beautiful in Figma, then spend hours trying to recreate it in HTML, CSS, React, Tailwind… fighting pixel precision and responsiveness.

Figma Sites changes all of that.

Now, your prototypes are your websites. With drag-and-drop layouts, prebuilt blocks, and even AI-generated interactions, you can deploy directly from your design file. I can’t stress how powerful this is for someone like me who juggles between the creative and technical worlds.

In my uni projects, we often don’t have a dedicated designer. Sometimes I’m doing both — sketching the UI and writing the backend. Having to jump to WordPress or Webflow was always a bottleneck. Figma Sites removes that hurdle. I can now design with the intent to ship — and actually do it, faster.

The upcoming CMS integration also excites me. Managing dynamic content — especially in portfolio sites, student showcases, or product pages — was always a bit of a patchwork process. This could streamline all of it.

Figma Make: AI That Actually Understands Design

There’s a flood of AI tools right now, but most of them don’t “get” design. They’re either generic code generators or clunky helpers at best. What Figma Make promises is different: AI that sees the context of your visual layout and generates functional code accordingly.

Built on Anthropic’s Claude 3.7, Make doesn’t just respond to your prompt — it respects your design. You can describe what you want (“make this a functional music player where the disc spins when a new song plays”) and get working logic. No back-and-forth between ChatGPT and your Workspace. No copy-pasting broken snippets from StackOverflow.

For me, this could replace a whole phase of prototyping. I’m already thinking about how I could use this in my capstone project — describing dynamic UI interactions or even quick Firebase-integrated interfaces, straight from my design file.

Make also gives me freedom to play. I’ve always had ideas for apps — mood trackers, gamified study dashboards, random utilities, Social media UI’s — but never the time to fully build them out. With Make, the barrier to entry just dropped drastically.

Figma Buzz: The Developer’s Shortcut to Beautiful Branding

At first glance, Buzz seems like it’s just for marketing teams. Templates, social media graphics, branded email assets… that’s great — but I’m not in marketing, right?

Wrong.

When you’re working on a solo project, you are everything — the developer, the designer, the copywriter, and yes, the marketer. Having a tool like Buzz means I no longer need to open Canva just to make a launch image, or figure out how to make LinkedIn banners look decent. I can generate assets based on my brand’s colors and fonts, tweak them, and deploy. Quickly.

Even better — Buzz lets you bulk-create images from spreadsheets. Imagine uploading a list of all your app’s features or testimonials, and generating a whole marketing kit in one go. For student startups, indie devs, and even uni assignment presentations, this is a life-saver.

Figma Draw: Adobe Illustrator, But Less Intimidating

Figma Draw is built for speed and simplicity. Want to make a vector logo? Done. Want to mock up an icon for a navbar? Easy. Need custom art for a game UI? No need to leave the Figma tab.

I’ve used Figma to build UI for websites before — and having a tool like Draw means I can stay inside the same ecosystem. The texture brushes, path tools, and stylized vector effects are more than enough for most use cases, and if I ever need to scale up, it’s still editable and lightweight.

This feels like a love letter to developers who need “just enough” design capability without drowning in options.

The Workflow Shift We’ve Been Waiting For

As a developer, I used to treat Figma like a reference board. Something I’d open, peek at, then close as I translated its ideas into actual code.

With Sites, Make, Buzz, and Draw, Figma is no longer just a design tool — it’s a creation tool. A launch tool.

This is the first time I feel like I can stay in one platform from idea to prototype deployment, especially as a solo dev or part of a lean team. And for people like me — students, indie hackers, open-source tinkerers — that means everything.

It means we can test more ideas. Share them faster. Learn design and development at the same time. And ship.

Final Thought

This update feels like the natural evolution of where product creation is headed: less switching, more making. And in that sense, Figma isn’t just taking on Adobe or WordPress — it’s redefining what it means to build something online.

I’m excited to keep building with this new Figma. Not just as a dev, but as a maker.

By Bharat Sharma May 9, 2025