Figma is a browser-based design tool for building user interfaces — app screens, websites, icons, and the reusable design systems behind them. It runs entirely in a browser tab (or a desktop app that wraps the same thing), so a file opens instantly for anyone with the link, with no software to install and no version-mismatch problems.
Before Figma, interface design mostly happened in Photoshop — a tool built for editing photographs, repurposed for screens. Figma was built from scratch for screens: real-time multiplayer editing (everyone sees the same file update live, like a Google Doc), components that update everywhere at once when you fix one, and layouts that resize themselves instead of needing every element nudged by hand.
Photoshop and Paint are raster editors — an image is a grid of colored pixels, and zooming in far enough eventually shows visible squares. Figma is a vector editor — a shape is stored as math (points, curves, fills), so it stays perfectly sharp at any zoom level or screen size, which is exactly what interface design needs: the same button has to look crisp on a phone and a 4K monitor.
Vector vs. raster
This distinction matters for one very practical reason later in this course: text and vector shapes in Figma are never blurry no matter how far you zoom in — there's no such thing as a low-resolution vector.
Every screenshot in this course is a real capture from an actual Figma file built for this course — not an AI-generated approximation of the interface. What you see here is what you'll see when you open Figma yourself.
Figma has a genuinely usable free "Starter" tier — unlimited personal files, the full design toolset, and enough to build everything in this course. Paid tiers add things like unlimited team projects and higher API/automation limits, which don't matter for learning.