Inside Figma: reflections on a remote internship | Figma Blog

Jenning Chen reflects on her remote internship at Figma and the process of taking improvements to the style picker from concept to launch. Despite concerns about isolation and communication, Figma’s intentional remote culture helped her build relationships, learn the product, and receive support. Her project added search, a color-style list view, and visible text-style metrics while giving her experience across Figma’s technology stack.

A Warm Welcome

• Slack messages, virtual coffee chats, and a collaborative welcome card helped Chen feel connected from the start.
• Although the internship was fully remote, Figma maintained the open and welcoming culture that had first attracted her years earlier.

Building Relationships Remotely

• Chen initially worried that remote work would make it harder to form relationships or ask for help.
• Company-wide events created regular opportunities to meet colleagues:
  • Show-and-tell meetings for sharing work and learnings
  • Thursday tech talks about coworkers’ interests and projects
  • One-on-ones about Figma’s product and growth
  • Virtual cooking classes, escape rooms, and scavenger hunts
• These activities helped replace informal office interactions and encouraged connections beyond her immediate team.

Developing Product Fluency

• Before beginning her project, Chen needed to understand Figma’s features and design terminology.
• She relied on her mentor, teammates, and Slack channels for answers.
• Colleagues were willing to schedule calls and work through obstacles with her, making remote collaboration more effective than she expected.

Improving the Style Picker

• The style picker lets users browse and apply paint, text, effect, and layout-grid styles.
• As users accumulated more styles, the original grid-based interface became difficult to navigate:
  • Important style information was obscured.
  • Users had to scroll through long lists.
  • Finding a specific style was inefficient.
• Working with product designer Shana Hu, Chen implemented:
  • Search: Lets users find styles with a few keystrokes.
  • Color styles list view: Displays style names clearly beside thumbnails.
  • Text style metrics: Shows font size and line height directly in the picker.

Technical and Launch Challenges

• The project exposed Chen to multiple parts of Figma’s stack:
  • TypeScript and C++ in the editor
  • Ruby in the backend
• She presented the work at an internal show-and-tell and received supportive feedback from coworkers.
• Launch preparation required migrating millions of existing text styles to add font-size and line-height metadata.
• The migration took an entire day, alongside the work of incorporating critique feedback and fixing last-minute bugs.

The internship demonstrated that a thoughtfully structured remote environment can support mentorship, relationship-building, and meaningful ownership. Chen’s experience also shows how an intern can contribute to a high-impact product feature while gaining broad technical and product knowledge.