Creator: Enrico Tartarotti · Published: 2025-03-15 · Length: 11:17 · Watch on YouTube

Figma has taken over the design world dethroning giants like Adobe. How did they do it? What hides behind figma's design and genius psychology? (from the video description)

A short explainer built around three "psychological principles" behind Figma's success, illustrated with screen recordings of After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and Figma plus a clip of Figma founder Dylan Field. The auto captions garble a few words (Mobbin appears as "Mobin," squircle as "squirle," caustic as "costic," and the outro's "I'm Enrico" as "I'm a Rico"); corrected spellings are used below. Figures (funding, launch timelines, the acquisition price and revenue multiple) are as stated in the video. Chapter times come from the video description, with sub-section times from the transcript.

1) Detailed outline

[0:00] Intro

• If you design anything for a screen today, Enrico says, there's only one choice: Figma. Every design job asks for it, and he's never seen software take over an industry so quickly.
• The puzzle: Photoshop and Illustrator melt his computer with massive files, while Figma loads a giant project with 10 people collaborating in real time "on my crusty browser."
• He promises three key psychological principles behind Figma's design, the first solving "one of the hardest problems to solve in tech." Sponsor: Mobbin.

[0:44] Cognitive overload

• The After Effects problem. As a new user who just wants to animate some text, he opens Adobe After Effects (the tool he uses for his video animations) and finds menus full of "3D frame blending," "pixel motion," "advanced spill suppressor," "Wiggler" and "Boris FX Mocha."
• How pro tools bloat. Every tool starts simple, but advanced users keep asking for advanced features. In Photoshop's Edit menu, copy and paste sit next to content-aware scale, puppet warp, Adobe PDF presets and OpenColorIO settings, so basic and advanced features get mixed together into a scary interface.
• [2:00] Cognitive overload: given too much information at once, the brain can't process it. Figma instead looks approachable, "like you don't need a 4-hour tutorial," yet it's still professional: the apps you use daily are designed in it, it handles complex interactive prototypes and design systems with conditional logic, and it also works for a simple presentation. He went from basic presentations to the complex social media redesign prototype in his previous video without feeling overwhelmed.
• [2:40] The failed fix: customization. Traditional tools let users rearrange panels to show only what they need, but that just moves complexity around and adds window presets to manage, plus the frustration of discovering what you need is in a panel you hid.
• [3:00] Principle 1: progressive disclosure. Figma's basic tools (rectangle, circle, text) are actually basic, while Illustrator mixes "create text" with advanced commands like objects on path. Making an iOS icon, he rounds a rectangle's corners; because iOS icons are really squircles, the advanced corner-smoothing option appears only inside the rounded-corners panel, complete with a marker for the iOS smoothing level. Deselect and you're back to a clean interface. Options appear only in the right context, which he says is extremely hard to design well.
• [4:20] The lazy genius of instant plugins. When users asked for the really advanced stuff, Figma told them to build it themselves. Removing an image background or generating cool gradients isn't built in, but you search for a plugin and it loads instantly. Plugins have existed forever; the difference is no installing or reloading, you type what you want and run it, choosing among several, and Figma didn't have to do the work.
• [5:00] Sponsor: Mobbin, a library of screenshots of complete flows from major apps and websites, with importable working Figma prototypes and search by concept ("fun," gamification, carousels). He used it for his social media redesign video.
• [6:00] What Figma hasn't cracked. The left-hand layer tree becomes an unnavigable mess quickly, and founder Dylan Field admits in a clip that Figma's pages aren't "the most elegant solution" for product design. Enrico has often wondered why a project looked empty when everything was on another page.

[6:08] Team flow state

• Flow state is total absorption in a task (coding, painting, designing, writing) where hours fly by and you're insanely productive. He says the idea was introduced in 1975 by a researcher whose name he won't attempt to pronounce (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi).
• Flow is usually individual. Afterward you save a file named something like "final v3 ultimate superfinal number two," share it, collect comments in another app, and merge someone else's separate version, so focus turns into a mess when working with others.
• Principle 2: collective flow. Figma pioneered letting groups reach a shared flow state on one project. As a product manager at his last company, he spent hours in Figma with his designer, mocking up solutions on the fly, then an engineer would join to discuss technical tweaks. Everyone saw each other's cursors in real time, left comments and worked on the latest version.
• Real-time cursors with names and no more file versions are now everywhere, including Google Docs, but Enrico credits Figma with pioneering it.

[8:21] Technical foundations

• The browser bet. Around 2012, when Facebook was getting popular and browsers ran simple online games, you couldn't do much in a browser. Dylan Field believed design tools belonged in the browser, and people scoffed at the idea of running a Photoshop-class app there.
• The WebGL demo. Evan Wallace, a teaching assistant at Field's university, showed him a demo of a ball in a pool of water with physics and caustics simulation running in the browser via WebGL. It was the missing piece.
• Convincing investors. While fundraising they built small demos of Photoshop-like features in the browser, such as extracting the colors from a photo, because no one believed it was possible.
• [9:20] Three years in secret. After raising $3.8 million from Index Ventures in 2013, they did the opposite of the startup playbook. Enrico compares time to launch: GitHub six months, Canva one year, Figma three years of private work without releasing anything, against Silicon Valley's ship-fast-and-iterate norm.
• Principle 3: crazy technical foundations. An app that stays hyper-performant in real time on giant media-heavy projects, with multiple simultaneous editors and instant plugins, all in a browser on a cheap laptop for millions of people, is an insane technical challenge, which is why rivals have struggled to catch up.
• Adobe's answer. Unable to match it, Adobe tried to buy Figma for $20 billion, about 50 times Figma's annual revenue at the time (as stated). Antitrust regulators stopped the deal because Figma was the only viable competitor; Enrico jokes Adobe would otherwise have added "the entire observable universe" to Creative Cloud. (He dates the acquisition to 2023; Adobe announced it in 2022 and abandoned it in December 2023.)
• [10:40] Outro. He points to his video redesigning social media in Figma so that Instagram, TikTok and YouTube might adopt it.

2) Things mentioned

Design tools and software

• Figma (design, prototyping, design systems, presentations, real-time multiplayer, instant plugins, pages and the layer tree)
• Figma plugins for background removal and gradient generation
• Adobe After Effects (Wiggler, pixel motion, advanced spill suppressor, Boris FX Mocha tracking)
• Adobe Photoshop (content-aware scale, puppet warp, Adobe PDF presets, OpenColorIO settings)
• Adobe Illustrator (objects on path)
• Adobe Creative Cloud
• Google Docs (real-time collaborative cursors)
• Mobbin (sponsor; UI flow screenshot library with importable Figma prototypes)
• Flask (flask.do), Enrico's video collaboration tool

Technology

• WebGL and Evan Wallace's in-browser water and caustics simulation demo
• Browser-based apps around 2012 (Facebook and simple online games)
• iOS app icons and the squircle (corner smoothing)

Design and psychology concepts

• Cognitive overload in professional software
• Customizable panels and window presets as a failed fix
• Progressive disclosure
• Instant, no-install plugins as a way to offload advanced features
• Flow state, and team or collective flow state
• File-version chaos ("final v3 ultimate superfinal number two")

Companies, deals and figures

• Index Ventures ($3.8 million into Figma in 2013, as stated)
• Time to launch: GitHub six months, Canva one year, Figma three years
• Adobe's $20 billion bid for Figma (about 50 times revenue, as stated), blocked on antitrust grounds
• Instagram, TikTok, YouTube (targets of his social media redesign video)

3) Biographies

Enrico Tartarotti

Italian-born YouTuber, designer and entrepreneur whose channel goes behind the scenes of the design, psychology and stories behind tech. He describes himself as a tech product manager and "builder of things made of pixels," draws here on his time as a PM using Figma with his team, and is building Flask (flask.do), a video collaboration tool.

Dylan Field

Co-founder and CEO of Figma, which he started in 2012 after leaving Brown University on a Thiel Fellowship. Enrico credits his early conviction that design tools belonged in the browser, and shows a clip of him admitting Figma's pages aren't the most elegant solution.

Evan Wallace

Co-founder and former CTO of Figma, a fellow Brown student (Enrico calls him a teaching assistant at Field's university) whose WebGL graphics demos, including a water simulation, convinced Field the browser could run a professional design tool. He built much of Figma's rendering technology and later created the esbuild JavaScript bundler.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Hungarian-American psychologist (1934–2021) who developed the concept of flow, first described in his 1975 book Beyond Boredom and Anxiety. Enrico mentions him without naming him, joking that he won't attempt to pronounce the name.