We’re currently exploring how we can integrate Figma Buzz into our educational resource creation workflow. We’re excited by Buzz’s potential, especially its responsive design and design quality, and are reaching out to share our feedback and some critical feature requests to help us adopt Figma more fully across our content pipeline.
💡 Our Use Case: Automated Resource Generation
Our ideal workflow looks like this:
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Create Figma templates with defined text/image placeholders (e.g. "Title", "Question", "Image").
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Programmatically replace these placeholders via an API using content from our backend.
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Export the resulting designs as individual PDFs, ready to attach to educational videos.
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This would allow our content team to generate polished, on-brand learning materials at scale - directly from our curation tools - with minimal manual input.
🔍 Key Gaps and Friction Points
| Feature | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| REST API for generation | ❌ | No current support for content generation via API. A blocker for automating our workflow. |
| Export as individual PDFs (outside design mode) | 🤷🏻♀️ | Have to do in design mode |
| Remembers variable mappings | ❌ | Variables must be remapped with each CSV upload; this slows down batch work. |
| Image variables from CSV | ✅ | Excellent support here—images as variables streamline templating. |
| Upload via CSV | ✅ | Works well for batch processing. |
| Bulk filename updates | ❌ | No native solution |
| Responsive auto-layout banners | ✅ | A strong point—auto-layout resizing works great. |
| Paper sizing for print (e.g. A4) | 🤷🏻♀️ | Manual |
| Metadata linking (e.g. frame name = spreadsheet value) | ❌ | Would greatly assist with traceability and searchability. |
| Pagination + overflow handling | ❌ | Needed for multi-page print resources and flexible layout behaviour. |
| Global search of frame IDs / text | 🤷🏻♀️ | Currently delayed |
🧩 Workflow Today in Figma
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Generate CSVs per template
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Upload CSV to Figma per batch
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Reorder pages and group by row
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Swap in images
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Review and QC layout
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Rename files
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Export PDFs individually in design mode or row by row for multipage
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Upload final resources to our content pipeline.
This is functional - but we're looking to remove repetitive manual steps and enable deeper automation for scale.
🌟 Feature Requests (Summary)
API / Automation
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Ability to programmatically replace template variables via REST API
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Automate PDF export per row/item in a CSV
Template & File Management
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Remember variable mappings from previous CSVs
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Associate file names with values in the spreadsheet (e.g. video ID)
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Support for CMYK & frames for print
Bulk Operations
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Bulk renaming
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Improved exporting options: export as multiple PDFs (not just in design mode), export multiple pages (currently hacky via rows)
Search & Usability
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More reliable global search for frames/text
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Save common CSV column-to-variable mappings
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Pagination & text overflow handling
We’d love to see Figma evolve into a seamless content generation platform for creative automation. Buzz is already impressive - these additions would make it essential.
Thanks so much for all your hard work!
