Resonant + Figma
Stay on the canvas.
Say the rationale out loud.
Designers write more than they admit — critiques, handoff notes, file descriptions, the reasons a component exists. Typing all of it pulls you out of design mode. Voice keeps you in the frame and in the thought.
Resonant transcribes on your Mac. Press a key, talk, and clean text lands in your Figma comment, sticky, or file description. No cloud audio. No plugin.
Used by designers at
Typed vs. dictated
Same moment in the file.
A totally different artifact.
Critique on a design
“button too small”
“The primary button feels undersized relative to the card it sits inside. When I squint at this frame, the card eats the attention and the CTA reads as a footnote. I’d try pushing the button height to match the input field above it and see if that restores hierarchy. Also, the 8px gap between the label and the button is doing nothing — close that to 4px and the group reads as one element.”
Handoff note to engineering
“see specs, use tokens”
“Engineering note: this card expands on hover, but only on non-touch devices. Use the existing motion token for the scale transform — we don’t want a new curve here. The shadow on hover is the same elevation we use for the modal, so please reference the shared token rather than hard-coding. If the card is in a grid, hover should not reflow the siblings, so the transform has to originate from the center.”
File description / rationale
“v3 — new nav”
“This file is the third pass at the new top navigation. The goal for this round was to collapse the five primary items into three, using a combined account menu for billing, team, and settings. I kept the search bar in the center rather than the right because user interviews showed people looking there first. The tabs below the header are intentionally lower contrast so they don’t compete with the primary nav.”
The insight
Typing forces
a mode switch.
Voice doesn’t.
Design work lives in a visual mental state — spatial reasoning, color, hierarchy, rhythm. Writing lives in a verbal mental state. Switching between them has a cost, and every designer pays it a dozen times an hour: critique a frame, drop a comment, go back to the frame, realize the comment should have said something else.
The cost shows up in what gets skipped. Designers leave one-word comments instead of real feedback. They hand off files with no notes. They save v4 without writing down what changed. Not because they don’t want to — because switching modes to type it out costs more than the comment is worth in that moment.
Voice breaks that tradeoff. You stay in the frame. You talk about what you’re looking at. The words appear where your cursor is, and you’re back to designing before you’ve had time to lose your train of thought.
Typing a thoughtful Figma comment means leaving the visual layer, opening the comment panel, and composing prose while still trying to hold the design in your head. By the time you’ve finished, the observation has flattened into something safer and shorter than what you saw.
The real critique didn’t survive the trip through your keyboard.
Hover the frame. Hit the hotkey. Say what you see out loud, the way you’d say it in a design review. Release the key. The comment — the real one, with all the specifics — is already in Figma. You never looked away from the canvas.
The observation survives. So does your flow state.
Where it fits
Six moments in a Figma file
that voice changes completely.
Critique comments
A useful critique is specific. It points at the thing, says what’s off, and suggests a direction. Typing all of that on a Figma frame feels like homework, so critiques get compressed to one-line judgments. Voice lets you talk through what you see without breaking from the canvas.
Handoff notes
The difference between a good handoff and a bad handoff is the amount of intent the designer captured. Voice makes it cheap to explain why a spacing token is what it is, which state matters, and what the edge cases are — so engineering doesn’t have to reverse-engineer your decisions.
File descriptions
Every designer has a file named “v4 — final.” Nobody remembers what changed in v4. Dictate a short rationale into the file description when you save, and future-you (or a teammate) can actually understand the file six weeks later.
Design rationale docs
Long-form design rationale is where most teams give up. Dictating a few paragraphs into a paired doc or a Figma text frame takes under a minute, and the result is a durable artifact that survives the meeting it came out of.
Research synthesis
After user interviews, you’re holding a messy set of observations. Voice is the fastest way to dump them into a Figma sticky, a FigJam board, or a notes frame — while the observations are still in your head and before the details leak out.
Component documentation
Documenting a component means explaining anatomy, variants, usage rules, and the reasons behind them. Typing that is the reason component libraries go undocumented. Voice turns twenty minutes of procrastination into two minutes of talking.
Architecture
No plugin.
No cloud transcription.
Resonant runs on your Mac. The speech model, the transcription, the cleanup, the formatting — all of it happens on your hardware. Audio is never uploaded to a server. Nothing touches a third-party transcription service.
That matters for unreleased work. Figma files often contain client logos, unannounced products, pricing strategy, acquisition rumors, and internal roadmaps. Dictating into those files through a cloud service means routing that context through someone else’s infrastructure. With Resonant, your critiques of the new brand mark stay between you, your Mac, and whoever you share the file with.
There’s also no Figma plugin to install. Resonant writes into the focused text field anywhere on macOS, which means it works in Figma Desktop, in FigJam, in the browser version, and in any note-taking tool you pair with Figma.
Free. Local. Works everywhere in macOS.
Keep designing.
Let the words catch up.
Thoughtful comments, clear handoffs, and design rationale that actually gets written down.
Requires macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon
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