Oh, Figma. One of the most revolutionary interface design apps that’s taking over the design world. It’s not like we need proof of it, but in June the company raised 200$ million from investors, valuing Figma at 10$ billion dollars. The first and main reason for its success is that it allows teams to collaborate on projects remotely. It was first launched in 2016, but...imagine the boost that it has experienced during COVID times.

While it was designed for prototyping digital products, you can do so much more. I’m going to share with you how Corporate Lab has found in Figma the home of ALL our designs and why you should give it a try. 

When I say all, I mean:  

• Brand Style Guide
• Low and high fidelity wireframes, interactive prototypes.
• Social Media content
• Banners and ads
• Merchandising
• Business Presentations
• Brainstorming with Figjam
• Moodboards

And other UX tools such as flow charts, journey and empathy maps...

We are an agile team that needs to quickly validate ideas and business models in order to find the market fit for our start ups. We found in Figma the perfect tool for us because it easily allows us to work remotely together.

I’m going to show you how we organize projects on Figma. Each project corresponds to a start up that we have created for our clients, and we create different pages in Figma for each purpose, as we go through the different stages of the project.

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As you can see on the screenshot we arrange the pages alphabetically, and put emoticons in the most visited pages. We can put everything in the same file because we are at the beginning of a new company, building an MVP for later iterations of the product. After 10 sprints the start ups gets its independence and we hand off the file to the new founders team. If you are working on a complex product, or one in a mature stage, you should probably use more than one file to keep each topic organized.

Why keep all in Figma? Let’s see the advantages:

• Everyone in the team (designers and non designers)  can access / edit the files. Traditionally designers have operated in isolation when doing design work. Now work has a clear home and everyone can access it. No more hunting for files or getting lost. Developers and designers work closer.
• Consistent design: Having the brand style guide, design system, components, templates, previous designs and basically everything, boosts design consistency. No more inconsistent layouts, flows and designs. No more reinvention of patterns and solutions. 
• Saving time: Designs are easier to access. Having everything in Figma saves time in Design and Development. 
• When you want to design social posts about the product you can easily incorporate mock ups in it.
• Scalability: Projects can grow in a sustainable way thanks to the consistent structure mentioned above.
• Doing brainstorming and other ideation sessions in Figjam allows you to paste frames from your designs on the board. You can use Figjam even for flow charts and other ux tools rapidly.
• It has plugins for everything. Plugins like Product Planner, Iconify, Wireframes, Unsplash, Figmotion, Content Reel, Color Blind... add so much value and agility.
  

Yes, we know that there are a few disadvantages as well, such as limitations in design tools not comparable to adobe functionalities. We still use adobe for some complex designs, we end up pasting them in figma. Other aspects to keep in mind are the frequency and volume of marketing campaigns, the people involved in the decisions, etc. But in our case the balance is clearly positive. It’s all about agile.

At Corporate Lab, we're experts in innovation. Corporate Lab is a venture studio specialized in creating new startups for large corporations.If you run a company and want to include corporate innovation in your roadmap, send us a message. We can detect new business opportunities and build new businesses to complement your existing ones.