dfield

CEO of Figma here. Most of the original insights around vector networks were in 2013, though we continued to polish the implementation over time. We didn't exit stealth and ship the closed beta of Figma until December 2015 which is why there isn't blog content before then.

At first glance, this thesis looks super neat! I'm excited to check it out! I don't believe I've seen it before which is surprising given the overlap.

Nope, Brown generously gives you five years before you have to apply again. You just have to remember to go back...

https://www.brown.edu/academics/college/degree/policies/leav...

Hi, Dylan (Figma CEO) here. You can use local fonts in Figma via a local daemon helper, our native app or by adding the font to a shared library on our Org Plan. (Assuming you have an appropriate license for the font.)

We're also hopeful browsers will expose an API for accessing a list of local fonts / font metrics with the user's permission. (It's a fingerprinting issue to expose this info without the user opting in which is why browsers haven't built something like this in past.) This is gaining traction on the Chrome team, which is really exciting! https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=535764...

https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039956894-Use-Lo...

https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039956774-Manage...

At Figma we're pretty open with employees about this stuff.

+1 I loved this class

Yep, Evan is my cofounder! We started talking about building collaborative creative tools using WebGL shortly after he built this demo in an afternoon during summer 2011.

Shameless plug: if anyone is interested in working with us on Figma, we're hiring. https://www.figma.com/careers#jobs

I cofounded Figma with the support of the Thiel Fellowship. It was definitely worth it to me, but dropping out of school is a very unique and personal decision. You should definitely apply and you should introspect deeply before taking it.

BTW, some of the statements on this thread that "fellows are used as poster children for Thiel's vision of society" and equating taking the fellowship to becoming a "living cog in his anti-education political statement" are just downright false.

I actually assumed going in that we would need to do press or something; after all, I've always heard "there's no free lunch." However, in reality I found the fellowship never pressured me to do media if it wasn't helpful for Figma. In fact, Figma was in stealth mode for the entire two year fellowship. There's literally no downside other than not attending school for two years. (And you can quit at any time to go back.)

If anyone has specific questions about the fellowship, feel free to reply and I'll try to answer later today.

^ constexpr is the author

I tried switching to Soylent and I would consider this inhumane treatment for prisoners.

Yep — in the video, our primary goal for the UI was visual: we wanted something that was visually very different from Figma so it would stand out against the Figma interface. Makes sense the lack of substance shows through ;)

While we don't plan to change the video, I think your point absolutely has merit.

In theory, yes. In practice, we haven't invested in testing Linux because designers prefer other platforms.

First, thanks for the congrats :)

1. We didn't want to talk about ourselves before we had a product we believed in. So we kept quietly building and we didn't announce until (a) the performance was great, (b) we had the features designers needed to do their work day-to-day and (c) early alpha customers were visibly excited.

2. I think we might just have different points of view on this. Our approach has been to build towards a vision rather than test a hypothesis as quickly as possible.

Thanks! We generate CSS styles and make it easy to export assets. We don't generate layout code.

Thanks! I didn't submit, so no control over the title.

If you want me to bump you up on the waitlist, DM me on Twitter: I'm @zoink.

Hey all, I'm Dylan Field — author of the linked post / co-founder of Figma. If you have any questions, let me know!

The author is correct that modern web applications are hacks all the way down. It's crazy sometimes. But it fucking works!

Look at Google Docs, which has changed the way teams collaborate. Look at Unity which recently ported their player to the browser. Look at the Autodesk 123D suite.

With technologies like WebGL and Emscripten, we're just starting to see the tip of the "native on web" iceberg. And it's awesome. I know because I'm helping build the iceberg... :)

Taylor Wilson might disagree with you... :)

(disclaimer: i'm a thiel fellow)

I second this. Actually, I'm an even bigger fan of his "Stop Drawing Dead Fish" talk, but unfortunately I don't think it is online yet.

If you are in the bay area, Instacart is awesome.

Am I the only one that doesn't think this is wrong? Metadata seems like fair game to me and I hardly think that Path is deliberately trying to steal data. They are probably just trying to make their user experience better.

(That's not to say we shouldn't have a discussion about data ownership and privacy. Just that we should wait to be outraged at things that actually deserve our outrage.)

I was also very fortunate to grow up in North Bay. My first interest was acting. I acted in plays, commercials, tv shows, etc. When I hit puberty, I stopped getting parts and developed an interest in math and programming. Then a friend helped me get a job at O'Reilly Media during high school and this led to my discovery of the tech industry.

I'm twenty - four years older than the author. Pretty crazy to compare our experiences...

5th grade (1/2): Everyone hangs out on Neopets, lots of people are excited about the GameCube. First time I ever heard of Google.

6th grade (2/3): Neopets is still popular (but popularity is starting to wane), people hang out on AIM, some start getting cell phones. lots of students carry their CD players to school and wear their headphones whenever they can.

7th grade (3/4): iPod Mini is the "hot device", more people have cell phones. everyone hangs out in AIM chat rooms.

8th grade (4/5): iPod Mini still in, most people now have cell phones. nerdy friends start playing World of Warcraft (some never stop, stealing to support the habit). Not many people know / care what MySpace is. A few people have gmail accounts.

9th grade (5/6): Everyone has MySpace. Most people are now using gmail. A few friends have blogs / Facebook. People torrent everything.

10th grade (6/7): MySpace is the hub of all social activity. Some start using Facebook once in a while. A few people create Twitter accounts. Only one or two rich kids have iPhones - they are teased mercilessly.

Glad you like it!!!

You can drag and drop a picture on any page, but that's not stated explicitly anywhere yet.

Congrats Connor and Colton! So excited to use this.

This is a problem I run into all the time. Really excited to try SendRail out!

Thanks for your comment.

If you are comfortable would you mind linking to your homepage or sending me your contact info? (You can find my email at dylanfield.com) I'd love to talk more with you sometime.

College.

I used to work at O'Reilly and this is a perfect description!

Fairly ironic given the content of the article!

The NYT article (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/business/zuckerbergs-big-t...) made a more interesting point:

"The taxes Mr. Zuckerberg and other Facebook shareholders pay on exercised stock options will translate into a big tax benefit for the company. The I.R.S. allows companies to take a mirror deduction for the employees’ option compensation. Facebook anticipates that the deduction will eliminate the tax bill on its $1 billion in 2011 profits, according to its regulatory filings. The company also expects the break to generate as much as $500 million in additional deductions, which can be used for refunds for 2009 and 2010 and for reductions in future years. Facebook declined to comment further on Mr. Zuckerberg’s tax plans."

“Due to the stock option loophole, Facebook may not pay any corporate income taxes on its profits for a generation,” said Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who has proposed changing the policy. “When profitable corporations can use the stock option tax deduction to pay zero corporate income taxes for years on end, average taxpayers are forced to pick up the tax burden,” he said. “It isn’t right, and we can’t afford it.”