Getting into the groove: How music shaped the scatter brushes in Figma Draw

From Doo-wop to Vaporwave, here’s how music inspired the 10 new scatter brushes in Figma Draw.

We built Figma Draw to give designers powerful tools for vector editing and illustration, so you can bring your creative vision to life without leaving the canvas or breaking your flow. We launched with an array of stretch brushes that render lines inspired by calligraphy, charcoal, and other handdrawn styles. Today, we’re expanding the set with 10 scatter brushes perfect for stippling and shading. “If the stretch brushes are the star of the show, scatter brushes are like the soundtrack, giving texture to the work,” says Product Designer Rogie King , who designed the brushes in Figma Draw.

The new scatter brushes bring even more depth, dimension, and dynamism to your work. While anything that’s vector-based can become a brush in Figma Draw, we wanted to give users a wide-ranging palette to play with from the start. The trick, however, was knowing where to begin. What styles would be most useful, most expressive, most versatile? To guide his explorations, Rogie looked to his collaborator, UX Writer Molly Marriner , who had named the original stretch brushes after movie genres. This time, she gave Rogie a list of music genres to spark his creativity. From Doo-wop to Vaporwave, here’s how the scatter brushes were born.

Feeling the beat

The world of music presented Molly and Rogie with rich visual possibilities. “Music was a great choice for scatter brushes because the patterns in a stroke are repetitive,” says Rogie. “They feel like beats.” In stroke settings, for example, you can change the gap, wiggle, and jitter of each stroke—much like a musician tweaks the tempo, texture, and volume of a song.

“Music was a great choice for scatter brushes because the patterns in a stroke are repetitive. They feel like beats.” Rogie King, Product Designer, Figma

To step outside of her own tastes and cast the widest net possible, Molly consulted the genre map Every Noise At Once and asked Figma employees for hyper-specific genres over Slack. “To narrow down the list, I kept the genres that felt most visually evocative, like Electroclash, Drone, or Witch house,” she says. “You can imagine how electronic genres like those lend themselves to a broken, repeating brush.”

The list that she handed Rogie included everything from Nu metal to Italo disco, and from Chopped and screwed to Samba. “Some were hard to distinguish between,” he says, “and some, like Spoken word, were certainly intimidating.” Some genres, like Rockabilly, had strong aesthetics associated with the culture, while others were more open to interpretation.

Cutting through the ambiguity, Rogie started tackling the scatter brush strokes that users would expect first and foremost, like one for stippling, a shading technique using repeated, scattered dots.

After that was when the real fun began. Rogie would focus on a genre, listen to the top tracks associated with it, and research the visual culture surrounding it. For example, when it came to Screamo, Rogie listened to “The Leaving Song Pt. II” by AFI and went down a rabbit hole of the early 2000s-era look— think mosh pits, black hoodies, and heavy eyeliner. That led him to create a brush with an “angsty, chaotic” quality. In other instances, he tapped outside experts, including his son: “He’s very into Shoegaze, so I asked him to show me artists in that genre.”

Through this process, Rogie drew 99 scatter brush designs to bring back to the team. “I got into a trance-like state and kept throwing paint against the proverbial wall,” he says. Then, everyone voted on the ones that would bring the most flexibility and expressiveness to the canvas. Molly then matched the final designs with the music genres she’d listed as prompts. Some were intuitive pairings, while others seemed to call for entirely new genres. She and Rogie met to christen the final list: Bubblegum, Witch house, Shoegaze, Honky-tonk, Screamo, Drone, Doo-wop, Spoken word, Vaporwave, and Oi!.

Making art accessible

The process of creating the scatter brushes in Figma Draw was a larger exercise in celebrating artistic expression. “The brushes in Figma Draw completely expand how creative I can be,” says Molly, who uses Figma to design books, zines, and other crafts. “With a brush that’s a mysterious wisp, or a smiley face splatter over and over, it’s a whole different range of emotions and styles from what was possible in the past.”

For Rogie, a self-taught artist, it was also important to be inclusive with the naming, instead of leaning into traditional art terms like flat brush, or gouache brush. “I never went to art school, never picked up a physical brush,” he says. “I wanted our community to embrace the joy of making art without worrying about having a formal education. These names are fun, but they also let people know, ‘Hey, you can be an artist, too.’”

*****

Like what you see? Sign up to get special editions of The Long & Short of It delivered straight to your inbox.