Over the last few years, Figma has emerged as the go-to software for design professionals and amateurs alike. Renowned for its user-friendly interface and collaborative capabilities, Figma is an extremely versatile tool that can be used for a wide range of applications, most notably UXUI design, however it's also very accessible for marketers and content creators looking to escape the “template trap” which we’re sure you’d be able to identify quickly enough if you’re familiar with tools like Canva and other snap and drag platforms.
We still love you, Canva.
One aspect that has helped Figma achieve market dominance is its feature-rich community plugin ecosystem. Through plugins (some paid but many free), users can implement a plethora of layers and dimensions to their designs by simply enabling a plugin within the platform and tweaking a few features to bring their creative aspirations to life.
As is the trend, the blossoming world of AI has found its way into Figma, ushering in a new wave of plugins that allow users to achieve even more with their work via both creativity and efficiency.
Here, we’ll introduce 5 Useful AI Figma Community Plugins for both seasoned veterans and Figma newbies. If you are someone who is looking to enter the design space but unsure where to begin, check out our mentor-led introductory UXUI course!
1. Wireframe Designer A plugin designed to instantly create wireframes using just your design brief and AI algorithms to analyze your design goals, user requirements and industry best practices. Once you are presented with an output that fits your brief, it's pretty easy to tweak and make additional customizations to get it just right. You can adjust the layout, rearrange elements, and experiment with different design variations—all within the familiar Figma environment.
Wireframe Designer creates its wireframes using a combination of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision algorithms; this plugin will first extract meaningful information from the text inputted to create a basic wireframe layout, followed by analyzing visual elements in the input to influence the wireframe design. Through extensive training and learning a vast dataset of wireframe designs and common design patterns, it is able to output sensible solutions, en masse.
What’s even cooler is that it continues to learn from user behavior and feedback, including yours, to improve its suggestions and creatives over time.
2. Relume IpsumTired of getting stuck on copywriting? Leverage this plugin to generate contextually relevant placeholder texts by simply writing the company description and selecting a frame. You can customize the length, tone, and style of the generated text to match your design requirements. Whether you need formal and professional text for a corporate website or playful and engaging content for a mobile app, this plugin can be of assistance. At the very least, this will help put your layouts in context, either for yourself, your design or your dev teams, so that you can move forward with the heavy lifting and come back for the finishing touches when the time is right.
How we bet it works:
Relume Ipsum was created to first analyze the company description using natural language processing which understands key themes and tones, to then leveraging language models and contextual encodings to generate appropriate content aligning with its surroundings.
3. Attention Insight A plugin that can simulate user behavior using advanced computer vision algorithms, which just like teaching a child to distinguish between an apple and an orange, advanced computer vision algorithms train computers to identify and understand images and scenes with human-like precision, sparking friendly tech wizardry from facial recognition to self-driving cars. This can guide you to optimize the placement of key elements. It can provide you with valuable insights on things like the CTA button’s visibility, even conduct A/B testing to instantly see how different designs impact attention distribution.
How we bet it works:
Attention Insight utilizes said computer vision algorithms to simulate gaze tracking, or where users' eyes move when they scan a site, to estimate where users are likely to focus their attention. It can also generate heat maps to highlight what it deems to be the most eye-catching regions in a design. Assuming it has been trained on large datasets of eye-tracking data from the likes of platforms like Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity, it learns to recognize visual cues and predicts user’s attention based on these heatmaps.
4. Avatars Generator This figma plugin brings diversity and personality to your designs by creating AI-generated photos of… people! Nothing sparks joy, dopamine and relatability into marketing like toothy smiles😁. What is not so smile inducing is the process of sifting through stock sites to find these photos. Say less fam, Avatars Generator will spare you from ‘stock photo sickness’ (if it’s not a real term, it should be) so you can focus on what matters most— product.
Moreover, Avatars Generator also allows you to adjust different aspects of the avatars, making each avatar unique, helping you to better connect with your target user group.
How we bet it works:
Avatars Generators likely utilizes a type of AI called diffusion models to create these images. It starts with a blurry, random picture and gradually makes it clearer and more detailed with each step. The AI learns from massive sets of different pictures of people of all shapes and sizes so it can make a wide variety of images. For designers, this is great because you can easily tweak how the images look. You can change facial features, expressions, and other details. It's like having a control panel for fine-tuning your designs.
Plus, this tool can also change the style of your images. You can play with the lighting, background, or the way your image is posed.
By the way– if at any point these technical terms have sparked your curiosity, you'll learn about them in our data science and machine learning [course](https://xccelerate.co/en/courses/FTDS) or via 1:1 mentorship should you want to bring your curiosity to the next level.
5. FigJam AI We’ve explored different AI tools to streamline tasks for Figma but not for FigJam, which brings us to FigJam AI. So, this is not so much a plugin but rather AI built in FigJam itself! It can save you loads of time when planning, ideating, creating templates and much more. You can use pre-built prompts or write your own intelligent prompts to create anything from weekly sync updates to gantt charts for a 3 month project, FigJam AI is your oyster.
If you don’t like oysters then think of it maybe as your gluten free snack of choice.
How we bet it works:
FigJam AI utilizes a blend of NLP and computer vision algorithms to interpret prompts and create visuals, while also employing recommendation systems that monitor user interactions to deliver tailored suggestions.
Wrapping it up
These AI tools and plugins are ever growing and will continue to adapt to the demands of Figma users and beyond, raising the ceiling for creative outputs and expressionism.
So, now what? You’ve learned something new. Before you move forth into your next piece of content, we’ll impart a few potential action items to make this experience more valuable：
- Be proud that you learned something new today
- Jump into Figma and start playing around with these tools, maybe spark an idea for a new project
- Become more than a user; become the next creator of a ground breaking or time saving plugin or app!
Choose wisely, grizzled internet traveler. Get started with these tools here, today. Or, shape the future with your own creations by learning more with us here.
Either way, it's a world full of oysters and opportunities!
