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.
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...
Hey, thanks for replying. I'm aware of local fonts, but you first have to get them onto your system, which is additional friction. With CC I can just browse their catalog and enable or disable what I want.
Have you thought about integrations with popular (among typographers) services like Fontstand, or smaller ones like Fontown? This could be a gamer changer. I really want Figma to become a real alternative to Adobe, not only for UI stuff!
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.
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.
I am currently in my first year studying B.Architecture.
But I want my lifes work(my core passion) to be around Software/Tech.
I enrolled to Arch school simply because I thought it was cool and did not do Computer Science cause the syllabus here is kind of out dated (they lack, an Artificial Intelligence module, something i want to get deeply into)
The vast majority of what you learn in a CS program was published in the 50-70s. Just because it's a little outdated doesn't mean there isn't a lot to learn. Also, don't forget that you can always change schools, as hard as it might seem, it can be the right call.
One thing that modern CS programs should give you is more insight into the engineering and craftsmanship side of programming. Also, I think most of techniques we use to build distributed systems today were built way after the 90s. Think of the all the stuff google invented, plus other significant systems paxos, etc. In the 70s they were trying to build scalable relational databases, now we can build things that scale much more, and it's not just hardware, it is the techniques to handle them.
All that stuff might not matter if you are most startups, because they don't need to build that huge shit usually, you can just use someone else's infrastructure.
Out of curiosity, have you tried the 2.0 liquid version? It's much better than v1. I only use it when I need to get a meal on the run, though. I can totally see how people could dislike the taste in this version.
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.
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.