It took guts to build such a complex app in the browser at the time
Ron Miller
9 hours
Back in 2012 when Dylan Field was a student at Brown University, he came up with the idea of building a browser-based design tool. At the time, design tools were all on the desktop, which meant that designers worked alone, sending files for review to the various stakeholders involved, then making changes based on feedback in a rather inefficient non-digital loop.
Field and co-founder Evan Wallace launched Figma to completely alter the design paradigm, one where instead of printouts traveling back and forth between reviewers and designers, everyone could work in the same tool together.
It was not unlike Google Docs, allowing multiple people to work on the same file at the same time, leaving comments and generally interacting and collaborating with each other on the web. The problem was that web technology in 2012 wasn’t really ready to enable this kind of des …
