I just moved to Bangalore from my college and was excited about starting my 6 months Internship as a Product Designer at BuyHatke. Coming from a Computer Science background, and from an extremely hot city with no sign of any meetups or anything (yes Vellore I am pointing towards you :p), I was already excited to explore Bangalore, meet fellow designers and most importantly gain knowledge and grow in these coming 6 months.
The day I entered my office, I finally got a Sketch license (which I couldn’t buy as a college student :p), and then this happened :
“Divyanshu, we are shifting our Sketch files to Figma so that we can all COLLABORATE.”
I had never used Figma before this, and hey, I just got a new sketch license. (WHY YOU DO THIS TO ME, GOD)
I had only heard about Figma before this and saw Vijay Verma’s post about shifting the entire design process at Zomato to Figma, but after I started using it with my teammates (and especially the developers :p), I fell in love with it within a week itself. Thanks to social media, which even knows what I am thinking these days (HOW!), I saw Being User’s post about the First Figma Meetup in Bangalore, and I just knew that I had to attend it. I registered at that very moment, told my teammates, and we all decided to attend the meetup together to interact with fellow Figma users and designers (we are a great team aren’t we? ^_^)
That entire week, I was super excited for the meetup on 19th of December at Accel Launchpad, especially after I saw the amazing lineup which included Mr. Karthick Murari Karnam, Mr. Dalpat Prajapati, Mr. Satyajit Thakur, Mr. Kevin Fernandez and Mr. Khuzema Ujjainwala.
The Meetup.
Well you know it's not just another meetup with talks when you start networking as soon as you reach the venue. Of course, the snacks were great (thanks for the healthy drinks with samosas and kachoris haha), but the number of Figma lovers and designers made the day even better.
The talks weren’t just focused on Figma and its tools, but talked about the basics of design, improving our design process, working together, and how figma can be super helpful in achieving these goals. The speakers shared their design process, how they manage their teams and how they use figma for all of this.
Figma not only brings people together virtually, but actually filled a room with designers to come, share their ideas and well, COLLABORATE physically. What can be better than that?
The speakers covered various topics like Designing at Scale and how Figma can be helpful when it comes to working with a huge team. They also spoke about Design systems and how Figma’s auto layout and library helps the entire team, how to share designs in an efficient manner, designing for enterprises and collaborating using Figma and last but not the least, how we can work with non designers (and make the developers and marketing guys hate us a little less :p).
Before you think that this was just like any other design meetup, Mr.Rahil Shah, the co-founder of Zomentum (a developer) also talked about how Figma helps him in working with designers. (a developer delivering a talk at a design meetup, how cool is that?)
According to reports, designers are still trying to crack the code for making lives easier for their fellow developers...and I believe, Figma might have actually cracked that code.
A big thanks to Rakesh Mondal, Aishwarya Naik, Alok Dubey, Being User and Accel Launchpad for organising this great meetup. It was definitely a great experience, and apart from just adding people randomly on LinkedIn (come on, we all do that), I actually got a chance to interact with them in person.