Beyond multiplayer: Building community together in Figma | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)
Figma argues that design is becoming more open, collaborative, and community-driven beyond real-time multiplayer editing. It introduces the Figma Community, where people can publish live files for others to inspect, remix, and learn from, alongside a redesigned workspace focused on team collaboration. The beta is intended to evolve through feedback from companies, educators, governments, and independent designers. ## From Multiplayer Collaboration to Public Sharing - Figma’s multiplayer features helped normalize co-editing and involving non-designers in the design process. - The company now wants to make it easier for designers to share not only finished work, but also the underlying process and methods. - The Figma Community beta provides a public space for publishing files that anyone can inspect, remix, and learn from. ## A Community Built with Customers - Users choose which files to publish on their public profiles. - The initial licensing option is Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, with more restrictive licenses potentially added later. - Figma describes the release as a multi-month beta designed to gather feedback and discover how organizations will use the platform. ## Use Cases Across Organizations - **Slack:** Publishing UI kits to help partners build better Slack applications. - **Dropbox:** Sharing culture kits for design managers. - **Unsplash:** Providing avatars and visual assets for designers. - **VMware:** Making its Clarity public design system easier to use. - **City of Chicago:** Offering a public design system that citizens can remix with their own identity. - **Lambda School and Stanford d.school:** Publishing free educational templates. - **Independent designers:** Sharing presentation templates, portfolios, tutorials, and source files. - **Square Crypto:** Exploring transparent, cross-company design collaboration inspired by the openness of the Bitcoin community. ## Learning Through Inspectable Files - Designers can publish editable source files rather than only screenshots or finished exports. - David Kulakevich’s Figma artwork demonstrates how viewers can inspect individual layers and learn the techniques behind a finished piece. - This turns community sharing into both a portfolio platform and an educational resource. ## Communities Inside the Workspace - Figma is also redesigning workspaces around the people on a team. - The goal is to make important files and projects easier for team members to discover. - This reflects Figma’s broader view that design files should be organized around collaboration and community, not treated as isolated artifacts. Figma’s recommendation is effectively to treat design as an open, reusable medium: publish useful files, learn from others’ source material, and build shared systems across organizational boundaries.