CANVAS > CODE > CONFIG
When Figma rolled out its first “Config” gathering in February 2020 the company described it, fittingly, as a conference built by and for its browser-born community rather than a top-down product show. The name came from the way designers talk about “configuring” systems: variables, tokens, breakpoints—all the knobs you tweak before anything ships. Five years on, that do-it-together spirit remains the spine of Config even as the crowd has grown from a thousand early adopters in San Francisco to a hybrid, globe-spanning audience that now includes a new London stop and a free virtual stream for anyone with Wi-Fi.
Figma itself has changed just as dramatically in that time. What began as a real-time vector editor in the browser now feels more like a full operating system for product teams. Dev Mode swaps the canvas for engineer-friendly specs and production-ready snippets, letting designers and developers read the same file without translation overhead. Code Connect, still in beta, goes a step further by pulling the actual React, SwiftUI or Jetpack-Compose components from the repo into that view, so the code shown in Figma is the code that compiles on release day.
Over the past year the company’s attention has tilted toward AI. An open beta rolling out to every paid account by the end of April 2025 can already generate first-draft UI screens, rewrite copy and refactor colour tokens at a prompt. Figma even resurrected its AI-powered “First Draft” app generator after a redesign that addressed earlier look-alike concerns, signalling its intent to keep machine assistance front and centre.
That arc sets the stage for Config 2025, landing 6–8 May at Moscone Center and again on 14 May at Magazine London, with both legs streamed free. Session titles hint at a heavier production focus than ever: talks on “prompt-to-prod workflows,” managing variables across platforms and tracking design-system changes with AI appear alongside the usual storytelling and accessibility fare. Dylan Field’s opening keynote is historically where big drops happen—last year it was AI and Figma Slides—so expectations are running hot.
The rumour mill says one reveal may close the loop between design and deployment. Internal beta testers describe a forthcoming button in Dev Mode that exports an assembled component—markup, styling and token references—ready to slot straight into a repo, not just a snippet for reference. That would move Figma closer to a true “design-to-code handshake” without turning the tool into a no-code site builder like Webflow or Framer. The talk track labelled “Production Workflow” on day two all but confirms the theme, even if the details remain under wraps.
Why does this matter? Because the gulf between how we sketch ideas and how we ship them has always been wasteful: duplicated effort, mismatched colours, pixel-perfect mocks that break at the first media query. If Figma can let designers stay visual while developers keep their preferred IDEs—yet both sides share real, living components—the platform may finally deliver on the industry’s long-promised but rarely realised dream of single-source truth. Config’s original tagline was “built by the community”; the 2025 edition could show what happens when that community’s tools build the product itself.
Whether you’re teaching first-year design students or steering an enterprise design-system roadmap, tuning in next month feels less like optional inspiration time and more like homework for the year ahead. I’ll be logging in for the virtual feed; if the new code features land, expect a follow-up debrief here. Until then, happy configuring.
