Figma is a design tool that runs in your browser, used to draw and prototype the screens of a website or app. Its standout trait is live collaboration: several people can work in the same file at once and watch each other’s cursors, the way a shared document works for text. There is nothing to install and nothing to email around. The file lives in the cloud and everyone opens the same link.
Think of it as a shared digital whiteboard built specifically for interfaces. A designer sketches a screen, a colleague leaves a comment in the margin, and a developer opens the same file to read the exact spacing and colors, all without sending files back and forth. That makes it a natural home for mockups and clickable prototyping, where you can click through a fake app to feel how it flows before any code exists. Stakeholders can react to something that moves, not a flat PDF, which catches confusion early.
Many teams also keep their design system inside Figma, so reusable components live next to the screens that use them. Edit a component once and every screen that references it updates. The same logic powers handoff. Developers inspect a layer and Figma shows the measurements, the color values and the font, so the build matches the design instead of drifting from it.
At TopDevs we work from the client’s Figma file as the visual source of truth, rebuilding it section by section so what ships matches what was approved.
