A tough pill to swallow: I still get excited whenever there’s a new design tool to play with.
Over the past few years, I’ve been repeating the same mantra in my head: “expertise over tools, outcomes over outputs”, as a way to focus on the substance of my work as a designer, rather than succumbing to the immediate gratification of producing something “tangible”.
Yet, when Figma announced Figma Sites during the Config 2025 keynote, I was intrigued. A new toy truck, in my sandbox?
Figma Sites seems like a natural progression for Figma’s product lineup. While website builders aren’t new, I see how Figma Sites could be particularly attractive to those with little experience in web publishing or development.
The process of setting up pages in Figma Sites almost mirrors the process of creating prototypes in your typical Figma Design files. To explore what Figma Sites is all about, I decided to create my résumé. I kept its overall structure simple with just two pages: “Home” and “About.”
Most of the content is static text, with links, images, and article cards linking to my Medium stories.
As I was setting up the pages, I was mindful of the content I was adding to my workspace. In other words, the purpose that each element serves on the page. Here’s a text box (”a heading”), and this one’s an image (“can I add alt text?”), and this element will be my top navigation (“wait, how do I specify that this is navigation?”)… Huh.
In the announcement post, the Figma team highlights responsiveness and expressive interaction of sites built with the tool. Efficiency, coupled with the speed of publishing live content, are the key selling points. “Build responsively”, “build faster”. Accessibility of content, however, is not mentioned once throughout the post.
Well, what’s up with that?