Make-a-thon winners rethink the basic gestures of software
Pinch-to-zoom, tap-to-like, swipe right: these micro-interactions have become second nature. This year's Figma Make-a-thon, run with Contra, challenged builders to imagine the next wave of those interactions—and push familiar ones in unexpected directions. The winning projects, sharing $100,000 in prizes, focus less on novel UI mechanics and more on how those mechanics can change the way people connect, create, and play together.
Common Thread: a shared canvas that rewards patience
Winner: Best Overall
Charlota Blunárová drew inspiration from the centuries-old tradition of embroidered samplers—practice cloths passed down and stitched over by successive hands. Her Common Thread moves that idea online: visitors pick a thread color and stitch type, then leave their mark on one shared canvas alongside strangers. The constraint is deliberate. "In an era where every tool is about speed and scale, the constraint is the point," Blunárová says. "There's just one patch of canvas for everyone who comes." The project has accumulated over 100,000 stitches.
Blunárová, who describes herself as having "zero engineering knowledge," built the real-time collaboration features and interactive canvas controls in Figma Make during a single afternoon. She created the logo and palettes in Figma and pasted them into Make as visual references. Her tip for others: "Start with the feeling, not the features. Describe what the experience should be like, let Figma Make build the structure, then layer in the design details visually."
Pucker: navigating without hands or voice
Winner: New Interaction
Aleyna Çatak wanted an alternative to tapping screens and issuing voice commands, which she found disruptive while knitting, cooking, or designing. Her project, Pucker, lets users navigate interfaces with head movements and confirm selections by puckering their lips—no hands or speech involved. Çatak built the prototype in a day and describes it not as a product but as a "flexible interaction layer" that could apply across apps and platforms.
She hopes the gesture becomes instinctual, particularly for accessible design. "Good design is invisible," she says. Her advice for other builders: "Have a basic understanding of how code works—even a high-level understanding can make a big difference when troubleshooting or refining your prototype."
Duet Booth: a photo booth for distant friends
Winner: Reimagining Iconic Interactions
Photo booths have barely changed since the 1920s. Paige Latimer's Duet Booth frees the format from time and space: two people snap photos remotely and asynchronously, and the tool stitches them into a single strip as if they had posed side by side. Latimer, a film photography enthusiast, wanted to preserve the shared, immediate quality of the photo booth in a digital setting. "I wanted to explore how that could exist in a digital space, where you can still create and share something together, even if you're not physically in the same place," she says.
The project required live camera feeds, image compositing, and real-time syncing. Latimer credits Figma Make with letting her focus on the experience rather than the engineering. Her tip: "Focus on the core interaction first before getting into visual detail."
Airwwave: an instrument that answers back
Winner: Boundary Pushing
Lee Black, a hobbyist producer and DJ, wanted music software that goes beyond buttons and sliders. Airwwave uses a camera to translate hand motions into ambient soundscapes, but the sound is designed to respond without fully obeying. "You're feeling the music with your hands rather than controlling it with knobs, and the sound is pushing back. You're in a dance with it," Black says.
Balancing randomness and intention was the central challenge: sounds needed to trigger at varying intervals and crossfade naturally, while gesture sensitivity had to feel responsive without becoming chaotic. Black started by using Make as a thinking partner to shape the gesture engine before building anything visual. "Airwwave isn't something you can wireframe properly," he says. "You have to feel it working." His tip: "Don't overdesign upfront. Get something moving fast, even if it looks rough."
Tokyo: a 16-bit city built for wandering
Winner: Excellence in Craft
Kiel Cole's interactive rendition of Tokyo is an immersive 16-bit world with no timers or objectives. Visitors wander streets, order ramen from an Ichiran-style menu, flip through vinyl, and take in ambient city sounds. "The interaction I wanted to create was one with no objective," Cole says. "I hope people will feel the way I felt walking through Tokyo—curious and completely present in the moment."
Each storefront has a custom soundtrack produced by Cole, plus ambient audio and details like an arcade with working claw machines. Make was the first tool that handled this level of complexity without friction. "It never felt like I was fighting the tool," Cole says. For anyone tackling a similar project, Cole suggests experimenting with different AI models: "Treat it like having different collaborators as each one has its strengths."
Reframe: making screenshots presentable
Winner: Fan Favorite
Dann Petty built Reframe out of a simple frustration: after spending hours crafting a UI, he would share raw screenshots without any thought to presentation. Paste a screenshot into Reframe and it lays the image out in 28 polished variations ready for sharing. "We spend all this time crafting UI and then share it without thinking about how we're sharing it," he says. "Reframe was born from that friction."
Petty had a working prototype within hours. The hardest part was restraint—an app like this could balloon with features, especially with the ease of building in Make. His advice: "Stop treating Figma Make like a code generator and start treating it like a collaborator. Describe the feeling you want, not just the function."
Honorable mentions went to Keita Saito's GestureBeat, a hand-tracked rhythm sequencer; Double Glitch's Wipe It, which erases text with a physical swipe; and Arwa Alharbi's Let's Play Figma, an interactive game that teaches Figma through play.
