Now that I’ve had a couple of weeks to digest my thrilling time at Figma Config London 2025, I thought I’d better write it down.
Me with a big sign telling me I was at the right conference
The last time I went to the ExCel Centre was for Star Wars Celebration 2023, so this was a different vibe. I wouldn’t say Config needed some guy dressed as a Stormtrooper but it wouldn’t have gone unappreciated.
As it was, I got there too early. Turns out Figma nerds don’t turn up in quite the numbers that Star Wars ones do so the queues were pleasantly shorter than expected. Happy to be surrounded by nerds nevertheless.
The talks were great - I particularly enjoyed the ones related to physical products and the overlap in design process; “Reinventing Polaroid in the Digital Age” with Stine Bauer and “How Figma became my gateway to physical product design” with Timothy Achumba. The product launches were pretty interesting. Fig Make looks promising, but Fig Sites left me feeling like we’re heading back to MS FrontPage which, as a fan of well structured, accessible, responsive code, I’m not sure is progress.
I’m not sure the British audience was as ready to whoop and applaud a product demo as those in The Valley. Neither was I sure whether I was being marketed to or was part of the marketing. It was more fun once I accepted probably both and also whatever.
My personal highlights though were two adventures hanging out with the nice folks from Figma.
Firstly, in CEO Dylan Field’s opening keynote he highlighted Peter Saville’s iconic artwork from Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album. He joked that someone in the crowd would be wearing the t-shirt, which has of course become utterly cliché by now. Then he said that anyone wearing one could go over to the merch stand, say he sent them and get some free stuff.
I don’t think there was anyone sincere enough to be straight up wearing the original t-shirt at this point, but there was one smart-ass wearing an ironic t-shirt of the t-shirt.
Smart-ass
It’s not every day you get to take the CEO of a Silicon Valley unicorn up on an offer of free gear.
I headed down to the merch stand and obviously, despite their branded t-shirts, those guys are just contractors who didn’t know what Figma even was, let alone who Dylan is. I’d chatted to these outsiders throughout the day asking them what their version of a niche conference would be; one woman said data analytics, so roughly related at least, but another said cake making, which is what she did when she wasn’t standing around handing out lanyards. So they were no use to me.
I wanted the credit for the t-shirt, I’ll be honest. Taking matters into my own hands I followed signs for the Figma offices, which took me a bit backstage but no one seemed to question it. Eventually down some corridor I found the Figma team eating their lunch. I felt a bit bad interrupting but you have to hold these CEOs to account.
Anyway, the first person whose sandwich I got in the way of turned out to be the head of Figma’s website. I forget his name and I can’t find him on LinkedIn, but a friendly guy who told me their site is built with Next.js and Sanity, since I took the opportunity to ask. He was sympathetic to my cause but had no idea so eventually found me their community manager, who was also lovely but whose name I’ve also forgotten. She had the merch power I was looking for though! So I grabbed a nice lilac t-shirt and a cap and thanked her for the trouble. I think she liked my t-shirt but probably wanted to get back to her lunch. I feel like Dylan might have been the only person to really appreciate the serendipity of the whole occasion.
Add that merch to the fleecy jumper they gave everyone on the way in and walking around town I am now, wholeheartedly, very much a part of their marketing strategy.
The second nice interaction I had with the Figma team was also at lunch, when I happened to sit next to their CFO Praveer Melwani.
I was attending Config on my own so being a loner I just sat down anywhere. I’ve been out of the networking game a little so was summoning the courage to say hello to someone when the lunch-eater next to me introduced himself and welcomed me into the conversation. What a nice guy!
We chatted for 20 mins or so about Figma and AI and work stuff, but it was more resonant to talk about life things like his background, that we both have young children and how weird it must be that the company he helped grow now had this whole event on.
Living and working in Bristol feels a long way from Silicon Valley, so I appreciated the chance to humanise someone I’d usually only hear on podcasts. We live such different lives and yet here we were, just a couple of people eating lunch.
Spoke to five people all day; three were on the Figma team and two didn’t know what Figma was. I’m hitting the two extremes of the networking scale, which probably isn’t where I’m going to make lasting relationships, but that aside, I feel more inspired and confident than beforehand, so a successful Config all-in-all.
P.S - You can get one of those t-shirts yourself if you like. There’s loads of other good ones there too, I also have this. Shoutout to Christopher Wright for making them.
Free cap merrrch
It's me, Sim
Discovering and solving the most impactful user problems via design thinking and design doing. I care about the real world impact of the experiences we build.