A few years ago, my Figma skills were roughly limited to whatever I could make from templates designer friends gave me. Sometimes I made silly pictures for colleagues. A normal user, basically: I can do a few things, and if I can't, I probably don't need to be there.
Then I changed jobs, and somehow this escalated. Sometimes I fix a layout myself, sometimes I make an agent do it because spending half an hour figuring out where Figma hid one particular effect is usually beyond both my time and my patience. And then I ended up in a fairly strange place: I wasn't just using other people's Figma plugins anymore. I'd made my own. It lets you send a design from Figma straight to your social accounts without exporting it and dragging it through three other apps first.
What a wonderful world. You never know where it'll take you.
Where I got stuck, and it wasn't where I expected
Writing the plugin wasn't the scary part. I got stuck on the pictures.
To publish a plugin, Figma asks for an icon, a cover and screenshots. The cover stopped me. Make it myself in Figma, where I am, let's put it gently, not very good? Give it to an agent? Do both and then spend ages choosing between things I'm not qualified to judge? I spent an embarrassing amount of time on this.
The problem was stupid, but real. I was about to submit a plugin to a platform full of designers. Actual designers. And here I come with my cover. People will look at it. People will know.
In the end, Claude made the cover. Simple, clean, no attempt on my part to demonstrate the designer apparently hiding somewhere inside me. I submitted the plugin and waited to be told what was wrong with the pictures.
The email came. About something else.
Figma's review was nothing like the others I'd been through. Chrome took two rounds. Adobe sent us back with changes too. Zapier had eight. By then I'd come to think of moderation as a kind of correspondence where somebody explains what you've done wrong and you write back when you've fixed it.
Figma said nothing. Then an email arrived: send us a video showing how the plugin works.
That was it.
Not "the cover is weak." Not "the icon needs work." Not even "who let you in here." They wanted to see that the plugin did what it was supposed to do.
We recorded the video and sent it. Silence again. Then the plugin appeared in the Community. It even has a couple of users already, which I particularly like because it means we're no longer the only people using the thing we made.
Only after that did I read Figma's review rules, which would obviously have been more useful before I started worrying. There's nothing in there about how the cover looks. They review whether the plugin is finished, whether it crashes, whether it does what the listing says, whether it's safe with someone's files. The only line that touches the pictures at all asks for an accurate description, screenshot, or previews, "so that the users will not be surprised by any hidden functionality." Not a good cover. An honest one.
So I'd spent several days worrying about a test nobody was planning to give me.
And this is where it gets a little strange
I didn't become a designer along the way. I didn't become an engineer either. But there's a plugin in the Figma Community now, and it has a perfectly decent cover.
A few years ago, "make a cover for a plugin" would have meant learning how to make covers first. Now I can explain what I need to an agent, get a few options, throw away the terrible ones and keep something decent. This does not make me a designer. It does, however, leave me with a cover.
I'm still not entirely sure what I think about that. Taste and a good eye obviously still matter: if you're given five bad options, somebody has to notice they're bad. But I also quite like living in a world where needing one particular effect doesn't automatically mean watching a forty-minute tutorial about it.
My actual job is getting people to use our product. I'm not a designer or an engineer. But somewhere in the Figma Community there's now our plugin, with a cover I couldn't have made myself.
Well. Apparently I can make Figma plugins now.
I wrote this one with Claude too, which feels about right for a post that's partly about not making things myself. I described what happened, it drafted, and I cut the parts that weren't true.
Has AI ever dropped you somewhere the old rules say you don't belong?
