For brands, Figma’s dominance signals a broader transformation. The days of siloed design teams and static brand guidelines are over. Today’s leading marketers are treating design as a living, shared system: one that scales across channels, campaigns, and global teams in real time. Figma isn’t just changing how creatives work, though; it’s reshaping how brands build, express, and evolve their visual identity in a world that demands both speed and cohesion. At Code3, we're huge fans of Figma and have incorporated it across our creative processes and clients.
We’re breaking down how Figma went from a niche startup tool to the backbone of modern brand design systems, and what that shift means for your team.
Let’s dig in.
The Origins: Adobe Ruled the Creative World (but with Cracks Showing)
To understand Figma’s rise, you first need to see the problem it solved.
Adobe has long been the Goliath in creative software. Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign were all go-to tools for designers, marketers and agencies alike. When digital product teams matured, Adobe launched Adobe XD to compete in UI/UX and interface design.
But Adobe’s model had limitations from day one in the UI/UX world:
- Installed apps, file versions, siloed work: Designers would work in local files, share via “hand off to dev,” export assets, package updates, and hope no one overwrote something. Collaboration across teams or remote contributors was headache territory.
- Legacy licensing and subscription baggage: Much of Adobe’s strength came from legacy creative workflows in print, image and video. The UX/design side was bolted in, not built from the ground up.
- Stagnant innovation in collaboration: By the time Figma came along, many designers were already frustrated with the friction of version control, sharing, dev handoff, and cross-team consistency.
Then came Figma.
Launched publicly in 2016 (with earlier roots), Figma was built around the idea of collaboration-first, cloud-first design. In contrast to tools locked to a machine, Figma is browser-based (with desktop support), real-time collaborative, version-controlled, and designed to scale across teams.
What Figma’s Widespread Adoption Means for Brands
It’s no longer just startups and product designers using Figma. The platform has evolved into a global standard that now powers creative operations across industries from lean marketing teams to Fortune 500 enterprises. Figma commands nearly 40% of the collaborative design software market, outpacing long-standing competitors like Adobe XD and InVision. What started as a sleek tool for prototyping is now a foundational layer for how organizations design, iterate, and deliver creative work.
That shift is especially visible in sectors like digital marketing, advertising, and web development, where speed, alignment, and iteration are everything. Roughly half of Figma’s users come from smaller companies, but enterprise adoption is accelerating fast. Brands like Vodafone, Uber, Rakuten, Volvo, and Square have helped shape Figma’s enterprise-grade features, driving its evolution from a designer’s playground to an operational powerhouse. Vodafone even credits the platform with boosting its design efficiency by up to 30%.
Why this Matters: The Ripple Effects for Agencies, Brands, and Teams
Alright, so Figma is popular. But why should you care if you’re running a brand, agency, or creative team?
Figma’s dominance signals a new era: one where creative collaboration is not a step in the process but the backbone of brand experience. For any agency or brand team aiming to stay competitive, understanding and mastering this ecosystem isn’t optional. It’s essential.
1. Collaboration is no longer optional: it's expected
When multiple stakeholders (designers, marketers, engineers, PMs, content creators) need to touch a design, friction is fatal.
Figma’s collaborative nature makes iteration faster, feedback loops shorter, and errors fewer. No more “I didn’t get the update you pushed” blame. For brands, this means design no longer lives in isolated files or static brand guidelines: it’s a living, connected system that scales across teams, campaigns, and channels. Marketing and creative departments can co-create in real time, eliminating handoff friction and maintaining brand consistency at every touchpoint.
What This Means for You: If your team is still using siloed tools (e.g. local Sketch files, static exports, slide decks for specs), you're leaving a ton of friction, time, and clarity on the table.
2. Design systems and scale demand governance, not chaos
Large brands have multiple products, global teams, multiple agencies, external collaborators, and many moving parts. Without rules, things devolve:
- Duplicate components
- Inconsistent styles across touchpoints
- Orphaned or outdated assets
- Confusion around updates and version control
Figma anticipates this with features like branching, token-based variables, workspace segmentation, library publishing, and permission controls.
What This Means for You: If you're planning to scale or already working at scale, adopting Figma (with governance baked in) helps preserve design consistency while letting teams move fast. Better guardrails, fewer cross-team clashes.
3. Handoff to engineering just got easier (and more reliable)
One of the most painful parts of design work is handing off to developers: exporting specs, redlining, aligning grids, ensuring consistency.
With Figma’s Dev Mode (or developer handoff features built in), the spec data, variable tokens, CSS values, component logic, and metadata are baked directly into the design file rather than locked away. Designers and engineers speak the same language.
What This Means for You: Fewer translation errors, fewer “but your design was wrong” emails. Teams move faster because fewer manual steps sit between “approved design” and “deployed UI.”
4. Future-proofing your tools
Figma is not static. It’s pushing into AI, live collaboration, code integration, and more. Recently: AI is becoming a bigger part of Figma’s roadmap.
They’re developing new protocols that allow AI tools to access design “code” (not just visuals).
Developers are watching Figma’s integrations and tooling roadmap closely as it becomes more central to product workflows.
What This Means for You: Adopting Figma isn’t just a change in toolset, it’s investing in the platform that likely defines how design works for the next 5–10 years. If you're still entrenched in legacy tools, you risk being left behind.
Objections & Caveats (Yes, There are Some)
As much as we’re singing praises, Figma isn’t magic. Here are things to watch out for:
- Governance is essential: Just giving access to all designers without structure invites chaos. You’ll need naming conventions, library ownership, permission tiers, audits.
- License and cost jump: Enterprise-level features come at a premium. There’s usually a minimum seat count or cost threshold.
- Learning curve & change management: Switching your team to Figma (especially from Adobe-heavy workflows) requires retraining, rethinking processes, migrating assets.
- Not a full replacement for all Adobe tools: Figma is powerful for UI/UX, component systems, design, prototyping. But tools like Photoshop, After Effects, Illustrator still have their place in visual design, motion, print, etc.
- Enterprise-level limitations: Some permission/security controls are only available at high tiers; managing guest access, restricting exports, or session timeouts require those plans.
But none of these are deal-breakers, they’re things to plan for.
What Should You do Next?
Here’s a roadmap for brands or teams wanting to consider Figma as a core tool:
- Run an audit of your current design & handoff workflow: Map every step: design, repo, handoff, spec, maintenance. Find the friction points.
- Pilot Figma on one product or brand line: Bring in one cross-functional team (design + dev) and test how things change.
- Establish governance early: Even before full rollout, define naming conventions, component ownership, file structure, library rules.
- Plan a phased migration: Don’t try to shift everything overnight. Migrate high-value components first, archive legacy assets, retrain team.
- Track key metrics: Time to first deployment. Revision cycles. Handoff errors or misunderstandings. Team sentiment.
- Stay plugged into Figma’s roadmap: Watch for AI integrations, enhanced dev handoff, cross-tool interoperability, and ways to future-proof your process.
Final Word: The Design Platform Race is No Longer Productivity vs Tradition: it’s Evolution vs Irrelevance
If your brand or agency is still sticking to older tools purely out of inertia or “this is what we know,” that’s a risk.
Figma’s rise from scrappy startup to high-stakes acquisition target was no fluke. It’s met real enterprise needs: collaboration, scale, governance, efficiency, dev handoff. And that means moving away from old file-based, static workflows.
Will Figma kill Adobe? No . But in the UI/UX design domain, it’s become the default. And for brands, that’s not a choice, it’s a tectonic shift.