Figma Goes Global: Japan, Paris, Berlin, and RTL Text Support
When Figma's co-founder and CEO Dylan Field started the company with Evan Wallace, he assumed it would be a long time before he'd get to explore the world. The product had other plans. From day one, roughly 80% of weekly active users were outside the United States. Field began flying out to meet customers globally, and those trips shaped Figma's vision statement: "Make design accessible to all." Today, the company is taking three concrete steps toward that goal across localization, geographic expansion, and language support.
Planting a Flag in Japan
Figma has officially expanded to Japan. It has incorporated locally, set up its first hub in Asia with a Tokyo office, and hired Hiro Kawanobe as its local leader. While some Japanese customers already use the platform, adoption has historically trailed other regions. In customer conversations, the reason became clear: Figma's English-only interface was a barrier. As a result, the team began localizing the product into Japanese, with a target of delivering a fully localized experience by the end of the year. The company is also hiring across sales, marketing, community, and support functions in the region.
Deepening Roots in EMEA
Alongside the Tokyo launch, Figma is strengthening its European footprint. Already operating a London office that serves as its EMEA headquarters, the company will add offices in Paris and Berlin in the coming months. Beyond these new hubs, Figma says it will continue exploring ways to expand language support across the region.
Why RTL Support Took So Long
With such a large international user base, right-to-left (RTL) language support has been a near-constant feature request—and it's now available in Figma. Field readily admits the company should have built it sooner, but the timeline comes down to technical fundamentals. "While some of our competitors get RTL for 'free' by building on platforms like macOS, Figma's entire rendering stack is custom built by our team for optimal performance," Field writes in the announcement. Figma maintains its own text rendering engine, meaning RTL had to be implemented largely from scratch.
Designing for RTL is also more nuanced than it first appears. Bi-directional text presents unique complexities: English words embedded in Arabic text, for example, require careful layout heuristics. Decisions around cursor navigation, text wrapping, and edge cases where automatic detection fails all need to be handled correctly. Arabic scripts bring additional challenge—letterforms can change shape depending on their position within a word, boundary characters between language directions can be ambiguous, and many fonts feature complex diacritics.
Figma credited outside developers Ahmad Al Haddad and Saeed Alipoor, who created the two most popular RTL plugins in the Figma Community, for working with its engineering team to ensure compatibility with existing plugin-generated text. They, along with evangelist Ido Zaifman and plugin author Tsurit Ben-Tsur, helped identify critical bugs during the beta period.
As Figma enters new markets, Field acknowledges the company may occasionally miss the mark. "My only ask: let us know when we mess up so we can learn and get better."
