Figma’s colorful macro pad aims to make life easier for designers

Design software company Figma is launching its first dedicated piece of hardware. The Figma Creator Micro is effectively a small mechanical keyboard (aka, a macro pad) equipped with 12 keys and two dials for quick access to your most commonly used Figma tools and shortcuts. It’s up for preorder for $139 starting today, with shipping expected in the first half of next year.

The Creator Micro isn’t an entirely original Figma creation. The design company has collaborated with Work Louder on the peripheral, which is a rebranded version of the existing Creator Micro. But this isn’t just a Creator Micro with a Figma-branded coat of paint. Figma product manager Rob Bye tells me the company has worked to preconfigure its version of the Creator Micro with some of the most important shortcuts for Figma users, including “object alignment and spacing controls, shape creation, undo-redo, [and] organizing layers.”

So instead of buying a Creator Micro or other macro pad and having to set it up from scratch to work with your Figma workflow, the idea is to buy Figma’s peripheral and find that a lot of the work has already been done. Of course, you can also customize the layout of the Creator Micro further to suit your needs, the same as Work Louder’s original version. Remapping is done through the powerful keyboard customization software VIA, which can handle all manner of custom shortcuts and macros.

Although the Figma Creator Micro is designed for use with Figma’s tools, Bye tells me it can be customized to work with any software, so there’s nothing stopping you from getting the macro pad working with competing software from a company like Adobe, which is currently in the process of acquiring Figma.

The Creator Micro is equipped with 12 keys, with each supporting up to four different functions depending on which “layer” you have the peripheral set to. In total, that gives you access to 48 different shortcuts from the macro pad. That won’t be enough to handle all of Figma’s 150-plus keyboard shortcuts, but it could address some of your most-used functions. Bye tells me that he personally uses the Creator Micro for things like aligning elements, showing and hiding the software’s UI, copying as PNG, and detaching and ungrouping components in Figma and FigJam but notes that it could be set to control a range of features like switching between Figma tools or creating components.

Naturally, the Figma Creator Micro also includes a Figma-branded coat of paint in addition to the functionality tweaks. You get three sets of keycaps in the box that can be affixed to its low-profile mechanical switches, including an all-black set, another featuring Figma’s colors, and a third with Figma software icons. One of the challenges of using a remappable macro pad to control software is just remembering what you’ve set each of the buttons to do, so hopefully these keycaps can be helpful here.

The idea of using a macro pad to control Figma has been around for a while. Over on Reddit, there are plenty of examples of people who’ve set up Doio and Elgato peripherals for use with Figma design software. But Figma’s official involvement has the potential to promote the use of macro pads to a much wider audience, not to mention significantly reduce the barrier to entry by configuring its own peripheral to work with Figma software out of the box.