From Furniture to Screens | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Furniture design taught Figma designer Sayer Pease that tools should support people’s activities without becoming the focus themselves. Figma applies this principle through simple, versatile tools, tactile controls, and a restrained visual system that helps designers concentrate on their work. The broader lesson is that useful design principles can come from disciplines far beyond digital product design.

Tools

• A small, well-designed toolset can support both simple and complex work, much like a hammer can build anything from a cabinet to a house.
• Figma’s pen tool was designed to feel more like a physical pen.
• Its vector objects use networks of connected points rather than traditional paths, enabling more flexible and natural drawing.
• The editor is intended to resemble an organized workbench, with essential tools easy to find and use.

Control

• Familiar, tactile interactions help users feel in control of digital tools.
• Keyboard shortcuts provide both physical familiarity and greater efficiency.
• Figma’s Command-drag selection heuristic distinguishes containers from their contents.
• Users can select nested elements—such as icons inside a toolbar—without selecting the toolbar itself, reducing the need to think about layer hierarchy.

Color as Semantic Guidance

• Figma initially used an almost entirely monochromatic, “unskinned” interface so the product would fade behind users’ designs.
• As functionality increased, the lack of visual differentiation made UI components harder to distinguish.
• The revised approach uses color without making the interface visually dominant.
• Colors add semantic meaning: green indicates actions, while blue indicates selection.
• This helps users understand what they are doing at a glance rather than focusing on how the interface works.

Learning Across Disciplines

• Product designers should challenge the assumptions and conventions of their immediate field.
• Valuable solutions can come from both historical design practices and unrelated disciplines.
• Furniture design provides Figma with principles centered on utility, organization, control, and unobtrusive support.

Ultimately, digital tools should enable users’ creativity rather than compete with it. Designers can improve products by studying how other disciplines create tools and environments that quietly support meaningful work.