The End
of Figma.

What design tools taught us, why they're disappearing, and what comes next.

Updated October 2026 · 12 sources · ~8 min read

Figma launched in 2016 and changed everything. It was browser-based, real-time and collaborative, and it replaced the clunky, file-on-your-hard-drive tools designers had been fighting with for years.

Its real breakthrough wasn’t a drawing tool. It was multiplayer: designers, product managers and engineers in the same file, at the same time. Design stopped being a handoff and became a shared workspace.

If you worked in product design between 2017 and 2023, knowing Figma deeply was a career skill. It was the tool that separated designers who knew what they were doing from designers who didn’t.

In September 2022, Adobe announced it would acquire Figma for roughly $20 billion, one of the largest software acquisitions ever announced. Fifteen months later the deal was dead. Facing objections from regulators in the UK and the European Union, the two companies called it off in December 2023,¹ and Adobe paid Figma a $1 billion termination fee.²

Adobe had decades of dominance with Photoshop and Illustrator, and its own Figma competitor in XD, and still felt the need to spend $20 billion to neutralize a startup. After the deal collapsed, Adobe said it had no plans to invest further in XD.³

Figma went public on its own instead, pricing its IPO at $33 a share in July 2025⁴ and soaring on its first day of trading. Then the line started to bend the other way.

For most of a decade, the threat to a design tool was another design tool. Over the last eighteen months, the threat stopped being a tool at all.

1. April 2025Figma’s own survey of 2,500 designers and developers: 78% say AI significantly improves their efficiency, but only 32% say they can rely on its output.⁵
2. May 2025Anthropic makes Claude Code generally available: an agentic tool that writes and changes real software from plain-language instructions.⁶
3. May 2025At Config, Figma launches Figma Make, its own prompt-to-code tool. The incumbent starts building the thing that threatens it.⁷
4. July 2025Figma goes public at $33 a share.⁴
5. November 2025“Vibe coding”, building software by describing it to AI, is named Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year.⁸
6. March 2026Google ships a “vibe design” update to Stitch. Figma’s stock falls 12% in two days.⁹
7. April 2026Anthropic launches Claude Design, turning conversations into designs, interactive prototypes and decks.¹⁰
8. First half of 2026Figma shares fall 51.6% in six months, while revenue grows 46% year over year.¹¹

Here are two things I've shipped at RVezy that didn't exist in a designer's toolkit two years ago.

# RVezy Design System v2.0
# Vue 3 + Tailwind CSS v4

## Button
Variants: default | highlight | secondary
Sizes: sm (h-9) | md (h-11) | lg (h-13)
Always: rounded-full, border-2, font-semibold

default:   bg-primary-950 text-white
highlight: bg-secondary text-white
secondary: bg-white text-primary-950

## Badge
success: bg-green-100 text-green-700
warning: bg-orange-100 text-orange-700
error:   bg-red-100 text-red-700

// Brand colors as RGB values
// readable by any tool or model

"primary": {
  "500": { "r": 0.184, "g": 0.706, "b": 1.0 },
  "600": { "r": 0.153, "g": 0.427, "b": 0.973 },
  "950": { "r": 0.075, "g": 0.145, "b": 0.345 }
},
"semantic": {
  "secondary": { "r": 0.153, "g": 0.427, "b": 0.973 },
  "white":     { "r": 1.0,   "g": 1.0,   "b": 1.0 },
  "black":     { "r": 0.0,   "g": 0.0,   "b": 0.0 }
}

Two years ago, every idea I had started as a rectangle on a Figma canvas. Today, by the time I open Figma, the idea has already been explored, built in real code and tested against real data. This is the toolkit I reach for first, and the one I’d expect any senior designer to be fluent in.

A designer's career has historically been built on being very good at specific software: Figma, Photoshop before that, XD in between.

So when I say Figma is losing relevance, I'm saying it as someone whose identity was tied to it.

The designers who are thriving right now aren't the ones who resisted these tools. They're the ones who recognized what actually made them good in the first place. It was never really about the software.

In a world flooded with AI-generated interfaces, taste is becoming rarer and more valuable, not less. I'm not watching this shift from the outside. I'm building inside it, at RVezy, every day.