Figma as Brand System of Record
Head of Brand Design at a Series E startup on Figma's wall-to-wall adoption
This reveals that Figma won by becoming the live home for a company’s brand system, not just a screen design app. Instead of keeping logos, colors, components, and guidelines in scattered Illustrator, Sketch, and slide files, teams could keep one browser based library that updated everywhere at once. That turned brand refreshes and cross functional reviews into an always current workflow, and made Adobe XD feel like another isolated editor rather than the system of record.
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In practice, the value was simple, one place to store reusable assets and rules. When a team changed a color, component, or pattern, everyone saw the new version immediately, with version history and comments attached to the same file instead of spread across email threads and exported decks.
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That same shared file pulled in non designers. At Lime, PMs, engineers, and marketers used Figma files as the place where product decisions were reviewed and edited, replacing the old step of exporting mockups into Google Slides or sending heavy local files around.
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Adobe still kept budget for Photoshop, Premiere, and Illustrator, but XD did not. The split that emerged was Adobe for specialized creative production, Figma for collaborative interface work and design systems. That is why many companies ended up paying for both Creative Cloud and Figma, while giving XD zero mindshare.
The next stage is broader seat expansion around the design system itself. As more marketing teams, PMs, agencies, and developers need access to the same assets and patterns, the winner will be the tool that keeps moving from editor to shared operating layer for visual work across the company.