Figma

Figma is the tool where most app and website screens are designed today. Designers draw buttons, menus and whole screens on a big canvas, link them into clickable prototypes, and hand them to developers with exact sizes, colors and spacing. It was founded in 2012 by Dylan Field and Evan Wallace, who met at Brown University, and opened to the public in 2016.

Its key bet was to run entirely in the web browser, at a time when serious design software had to be installed on a powerful computer. That made real-time collaboration possible: several people can be in the same file at once, each with a visible cursor, like in a shared Google document. Developers, product managers and clients can look, comment and copy what they need without installing anything. Teams keep shared libraries of components, so a button changed once is updated everywhere.

Figma also makes FigJam, an online whiteboard, and has added AI features and tools that help turn designs into code. In 2022 Adobe agreed to buy Figma for roughly 20 billion dollars, but the deal was dropped in late 2023 after objections from regulators in Europe and the United Kingdom. Figma stayed independent and went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2025.