Figma Pulls Make Designs Over Lookalike Output
Figma has temporarily disabled Make Designs, one of the AI features announced at Config 2024, after discovering that certain prompts could produce mockups resembling existing third-party applications. The company detailed the issue and its response in a retrospective published by Noah Levin, Vice President of Design. Other Figma AI tools—Visual Search, layer renaming, and text translation—remain available in limited beta.
How the Feature Generates Designs
Make Designs combines three elements: an AI model, contextual assets, and a user prompt. For this feature, Figma relies on generally available off-the-shelf models, notably OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Amazon’s Titan model, without additional training or fine-tuning. To guide these models, Figma commissioned two extensive hand-crafted design systems—one for mobile, one for desktop—comprised of hundreds of components and sample layouts demonstrating how those components might be assembled.
During generation, metadata from the design system components and examples is loaded into the model’s context window together with the user’s prompt. The model then selects and arranges relevant components into a fully parameterized design, inspired by the provided examples. Amazon Titan, a diffusion model, handles the image generation within those layouts.
The Root of the Resemblance Problem
According to Figma, the design systems were carefully reviewed throughout development and during a private beta. The issue emerged in the week before Config 2024, when new components and example screens were added without sufficient vetting. Some of these new assets were similar to elements found in real applications and could surface in generated outputs with certain prompts.
The problem was first flagged publicly by Andy Allen, a designer who spoke at Config, after prompting Make Designs to create a weather app produced results that closely resembled Apple’s first-party weather app. Figma’s team subsequently halted work to investigate.
Remediation and Next Steps
Figma determined the source of the similarities lay in the underlying design system assets. Those problematic components were removed, and the Make Designs feature was switched off. The company says it will not re-enable the feature until it completes an improved quality assurance process.
Levin noted that Make Designs originally carried the working title “First Draft,” reflecting its intended purpose as a starting point for designers rather than a finished product. Looking ahead, Figma aims to connect this capability with a customer’s own design system, reducing the time spent searching for, assembling, and configuring components. The company emphasized that while this sort of AI tool can provide a jumping-off point, the craft of shaping a first draft into a meaningful experience remains a designer’s job and a competitive advantage.
