Figma Make Gets a Properties Panel and Annotations — and That Changes Everything for Designers Who Build

Figma Make just shipped a properties panel and an annotations tool directly inside its AI coding editor. If you've been fighting vague prompts trying to nudge a button two pixels to the left, this is the update you've been waiting for.

The problem these features actually solve

Until now, editing in Figma Make meant describing what you wanted in plain text — "make the padding a bit bigger," "the font feels too heavy" — and hoping the AI interpreted you correctly. That's fine for broad strokes. It's maddening for precision. Every misread prompt costs you credits and time, and you end up in a frustrating loop of re-prompting the same small change.

The properties panel and annotations attack this problem from two different angles. Together, they give designers the kind of direct, visual control that felt natural in Figma Design — but now it works inside your actual, running code.

What the properties panel does (and how to use it)

Think of the properties panel as Figma's familiar right-side panel, ported into Make. Select Edit in the top-right toolbar of the Make editor, click any element on your canvas, and you get hands-on controls for spacing, padding, corner radius, font weight, letter spacing, line height, opacity, border style, and z-index (z-index = the stacking order of elements, like layers in Photoshop).

A few things worth knowing:

• Drag to reorder. You can grab elements and reposition them in the DOM tree — Make's version of a layers panel — which is far faster than describing a reorder in a prompt.
• Select all instances at once. If you want every card on a page to have the same border radius, select one and update all matching elements together.
• Staged edits, not instant commits. Every change you make gets queued in the chat panel first. You review the full list, discard anything that looks off, and only then hit apply. Credits are only consumed when you apply — not while you're experimenting. That's a meaningful shift in how you can work.

One limitation to flag upfront: the properties panel only works with new Make designs. If you've got older projects created before this update, you'll keep using the previous editing tool for those files.

Right now, edits respect the color and typography tokens (reusable style values) already in your codebase. Figma says Code Connect — a feature that links Make to your Figma Design components — is coming soon, which should make design-to-code consistency much tighter.

What annotations do (and when to reach for them)

The properties panel is great for visual properties. But what about interactions? Animations? Hover states? You can't tweak "fade in after 300ms" with a slider.

That's where annotations come in. Hit Annotate for agent in the toolbar, mark specific spots directly on your canvas with numbered callouts, and write your instruction next to each one. You're still prompting — but now you're prompting with a precise pointer. The AI knows exactly which element you mean, so there's less room for misinterpretation.

Figma gives some useful example instructions in their announcement: things like "when you hover over this thumbnail, have it zoom in slightly" or "add a subtle press effect when this button is tapped." That's the sweet spot for annotations — behaviour and motion that lives beyond what a panel slider can capture, but where location specificity really matters.

You can annotate multiple elements in one go and describe different changes for each, so a single annotation session can cover a whole screen of interaction tweaks before you commit.

Why this matters for designers who are just starting to build

Here's the thesis: Figma Make is becoming a place where design intuition is actually useful, not just tolerated. The gap between "I know what I want this to look like" and "I can make the code do that" just got meaningfully smaller.

For designers who've felt like AI coding tools were built for engineers first and bolted onto design second, the properties panel is a genuine shift in posture. You're not translating visual intent into words and hoping. You're clicking, dragging, and adjusting — the same muscle memory you already have.

The annotations tool is a smart middle ground too. It doesn't ask you to give up natural language; it just anchors your language to a specific place on screen. That's a workflow that plays to how designers already think about feedback and redlines.

A grounded take

This is a real improvement, not just a feature announcement. The staged-edit system in particular — queue changes, review, then apply — is a thoughtful design that respects both your intent and your credit balance. Fewer wasted tokens on prompt misreads is good for everyone.

That said, the properties panel's limitation to new files is genuinely annoying if you've been building in Make for a while. And Code Connect, which would close the loop between your Figma components and your live code, isn't here yet — so if consistency across design and code is critical to your project, you're still waiting on the piece that matters most.

Both features are rolling out now, available across all Figma Make seats and plans. Credits still apply when you apply changes, so the experimentation-before-commit model is your friend. Use it.