Inside Figma A Retrospective On Make Designs

Figma traced the rollback of Make Designs, an AI feature that drafts app screens from a text prompt, to the design material supplied to the AI system. In its retrospective on the feature's 2024 launch, the company says it used off-the-shelf models with no additional training or fine-tuning. The models assembled screens from commissioned design components, guided by example layouts. Components and example screens added shortly before its Config 2024 conference had not been vetted carefully enough, and a few resembled real-world applications.

According to Figma, those similarities then appeared in generated designs for certain prompts; a speaker at the conference noticed that a weather-app prompt produced designs very similar to Apple's own app. The company removed the assets and disabled the feature while working on an improved review process. In Figma's account the problem lay in the supplied examples, not in model training. An editorial update records that the feature was later re-enabled with changes under the name First Draft.