They started discussing the idea of building something for design that could work in the browser. He took a semester off during his junior year to return to Flipboard for six months, and that was about when he met Evan Wallace, a fellow student at Brown, who had already interned as a software engineer at Microsoft and Pixar.
Interning there deepened the sense he’d had, ever since he started making websites for his friends, of design’s essential importance and value to individuals and companies trying to stand out in a crowded, competitive world. Field admired Flipboard’s fluid and intuitive design, which tried to replicate the feeling of reading a magazine for a screen. But his fate was sealed when, the summer after his sophomore year, Field went to intern for Flipboard. He started making websites for friends, and an internship at American learning company O’Reilly Media deepened his interest in the wider tech world.īy the time he landed at Brown University, Field was still considering other trajectories outside of tech-he took some political science classes, contemplated a career in law, and even thought about returning to acting. About a decade after he left acting behind (which happened right around puberty)‚ that’s exactly what he would do with Figma.ĭuring high school, Field fell in love with web development and design. “That energy of play, of ‘yes-and’ in an improv sense-you really do want to enable that for people working in a collaborative space together,” Field says. When I suggest this connection to Field, he acknowledges how his previous life as an actor relates to the essence of Figma, even if he might not have set out with acting explicitly in mind when he and co-founder Evan Wallace hit the drawing board. The big bet Field made with Figma, a San Francisco company valued at $10 billion that’s changing the way designers do their jobs, is that this quality could elevate another creative practice as well: design. You can’t be a good actor unless you’re fully alive to what your scene partners are doing at any given moment. The capacity for in-the-moment collaboration is a hallmark of the acting process. (His credits include TV ads for the dot-com bust eToys as well as Windows XP.)
When Dylan Field was five years old, he got really into acting.įield won his first role in a local play because, he says, he had two very valuable skills-“I could sit quietly, and I could read”-but he was soon successful enough that he had agents in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, and he was booking commercial and TV work in addition to theater.
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