Figma, the web-based tool for user interface and user experience design, is introducing a new feature called the Figma Community . It lets you publish any design you’ve created in Figma to the public web, thereby sharing it with the world.

Now, designers already have a variety of online venues to present their work—most notably Dribbble and Adobe’s Behance. But Figma cofounder and CEO Dylan Field still saw an opportunity for Figma to offer its users something valuable and new. For one thing, Figma-built community features could hook directly into Figma itself—which, since all Figma work is stored in the cloud, would make it easy to share creations without having to export and import them.

More important, Field had something different in mind than giving users portfolio sites of the traditional sort—the kind of places you put your favorite projects when they’re finished and ready to be admired. He wanted to provide them with the ability to share live Figma designs that other people could deconstruct and learn from—much as the best way to learn how to build websites has always been to inspect the code behind other people’s pages.

“Our hope is to [create] a kind of ‘view source’ for design, which I think has been missing from the internet for a long time,” Field says.

With that in mind, the Figma designs you publish to the Figma Community remain editable, and the idea, for now, is that you’ll use the feature to share items that you’re happy to let other people use or remix. Anything you post is shared with using Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, a liberal license that lets you retain ownership but makes you agree that other folks can use and rework your creation as long as they give you credit.



Not that everyone will want to give that freely. The Community is launching as a beta so that Figma can get feedback from users; Field says that the company is thinking about adding licenses that would allow users to retain tighter control. “I definitely think there’ll be people that don’t want to make their work reusable by others,” he says. “And so that’s one thing that will go into the conversation with the community.”

But even in its initial have-at-it form, he adds, lots of the earliest companies to get their hands on the new feature have happily used it to reveal their work to the world. In some cases, they’ve created cool stuff that they’re happy to give away to others who might find it valuable: Dropbox, for example, is sharing its “culture kits,” which feature designs for cards with questions to spark conversations at work (“What habits or rituals help you maintain focus?”).