Should designers use AI or Figma?
Published
Use whichever one makes you do your best work. AI gives you more tries, quickly, and I think that helps experienced designers the most, because they can tell which try is worth keeping. What no tool gives you is your sense of design. That’s the part you can’t fake.
Where this started
The other day a designer on X posted a video about AI and craft. Companies are pushing AI to be more efficient, he said, and he gets why. He still opens Figma anyway, because he enjoys the craft and playing with things until they feel right. I use AI every day, and I agree with him more than you’d think.
For him that’s Figma. For someone else it’s code or an AI tool. I don’t think any of them is wrong. A tool is a preference, and the work is what you ship with it.
The part I’d question is the idea that the tool decides how good the work is.
What AI actually changes
AI gives you more tries, quickly. Before, you had to put every piece together before you could see if an idea worked. Now you can see ten versions of a screen before lunch and throw nine of them away.
Figma asked 2,500 designers and developers about this for its 2025 AI report. 78% agreed that AI significantly enhances the efficiency of their work. Only 32% said they can rely on what it gives them. That gap is the whole story for me. Somebody still has to know which of the options is good.
More tries don’t help if you can’t pick
Say you generate a hundred designs. If you’re not a good designer, how would you know which one to work on further? You’d probably pick the one that looks the most finished, and that’s usually the most average one. AI is really good at giving you the middle of everything, and a lot of the time the middle is the wrong answer for your product.
Somebody with crappy design sense can polish a bad design for days, no matter what tool they use.
A faster tool just gets them to the same bad design sooner. What you can’t fake is your sense of design.
Nielsen Norman Group, the UX research firm, tested AI prototyping tools on real design work last year. They found that “many AI-generated screens appear flat and interchangeable,” and that “it still takes human judgment to balance tradeoffs and create meaning.” I agree with both.
Why AI might help good designers the most
If making variations in Figma is how someone explores good ideas and gets to a quality design, then Figma might be the best option for them.
But if you measure the time it takes to make one design in Figma, it adds up. And design is an iterative process. Whatever you make, you’ll probably have to adjust it later, sometimes because of design trends and sometimes because of user feedback. So when one design takes that long, designers learn to make it in a way that keeps the number of variations low. It gets them to the final design faster.
The cost is that some parts of the design never get explored. You have an idea of what you want to make, and you have to spend your time on getting the job done, so you might choose not to explore for the sake of delivering.
Now say you’re a designer who knows what the final outcome should be, and you have AI tools. Exploring other variants doesn’t take you as long anymore, because it can run on the side while you’re making the design you had in mind.
That’s why I think the AI workflow might be even more valuable for designers with craft. They can explain their thinking, and they can tell which directions are worth moving into. And the more experienced you get, the more you’re expected to deliver consistent quality, so it gets easier to stick to what’s safe. So in my opinion, if you only use Figma, you might be limiting your creativity.
What craft looks like now
Most of the time the problem with a screen isn’t anything big. Usually something is a bit too loud, like an outline nobody needed or a label that pulls your eye away from what the screen is for. My most common note is just “make it fainter.”
No tool tells you that. You have to see it, and you have to be able to say why. That’s the part I’d call craft now. Knowing what’s wrong, and being able to explain why you’d change it.
So, Figma or AI?
Use whichever one makes you do your best work. If playing in Figma is how you find the idea, keep playing. If generating fifty versions is how you find it, generate. Just spend some of the time you save on your eye. Rebuild screens you think are great one to one, until you can see why they work. Look at your own work again a day later. Explain every decision out loud, like why a bar chart goes there and why that button comes first.
The tools will keep getting faster. Your sense of design is still the thing doing the picking.