How Polaroid is building its next era of innovation
Once on the brink of extinction, the company behind the beloved instant camera is reaching a new generation of users with a new approach to design, development, and branding.
The innovator Edwin Land, who founded The Polaroid Corporation in 1937, wasn’t one to shy away from a challenge. “Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible,” he said—and it’s this ethos that led him to introduce instant photography to the world with the Land Model 95 in 1948. Since then, Polaroid cameras have become a cultural icon: Andy Warhol used them to snap celebrity photos, Ansel Adams documented the Yosemite landscape, and David Hockney even created Cubist collages with the white-framed film.
The rise of digital photography, however, put Polaroid in jeopardy. In 2008, the company announced the closure of its last remaining film factory in The Netherlands. Channeling the spirit of Edwin Land himself, a passionate group of instant photography lovers formed The Impossible Project to purchase the factory, reinvent the film chemistry, and eventually acquire the brand name. Today, Polaroid is reinventing itself for the digital age with a new suite of instant cameras, photo printers, and mobile apps. Here’s how the team uses Figma to scale its design system, prototype boldly, and keep the creative spirit alive.
Building a single source of truth
To connect with a new generation, every digital touchpoint—from the website, to the Polaroid app for connected cameras, to the Polaroid Hi-Print app for printers—needs to feel consistent, work seamlessly, and stay true to the brand. Before the Polaroid team moved to Figma, fractured tools and workflows made this a challenge. Designers worked in individual files, which led to inefficient and redundant work. Without a centralized design system and flexible components, iteration was slow. In fact, there was so much friction in the process that the team only designed for iOS, despite also supporting Android.
With Figma, UX Design Lead Tim Parker has been able to start building and scaling a design system, and involve collaborators from beginning to end. “Figma’s cloud-based approach has democratized our design process, increasing transparency and fostering cross-departmental discussion and ideation,” he says. “With members of the team being remote, it’s a real game-changer. It’s easy to forget that this just wasn’t possible in an efficient way before.”
Leveraging design tokens and variables, Tim and the team can test new ideas and iterate quickly, and scale designs for different contexts. The new, streamlined workflow has led to impactful app improvements. For instance, the UX for connecting a camera now only shows the device the user owns, not the whole product suite, and the app theme automatically syncs to match the camera’s colorway. The team has enabled light and dark modes, and switches default fonts between iOS and Android. UI kits from Figma have offered quick starting points for these changes, while plugins like Autoflow help map user journeys before finalizing designs.
Taking prototypes to new heights
By unlocking powerful prototypes with Figma, the team has been able to identify and address pain points much earlier in the design cycle, and confidently validate their ideas. “Figma has enabled us to create more prototypes—faster and with higher quality,” says Tim. “Earlier methods lacked the ability for users to change settings, navigate freely, and genuinely test concepts in a natural way. User testing ensures we build truly user-centered products based on actual behavior, not assumptions. Beyond improving quality, it’s saved significant time and resources by preventing costly revisions later in development.”
Figma has enabled us to create more prototypes—faster and with higher quality.
Plugins like ProtoPie have allowed the team to test how digital interfaces work in the physical cameras in a high-fidelity way. “It unlocked an entirely new level of exploration,” says Tim, “allowing us to mock up elements such as the viewfinder, which was previously impossible for our designers to do on their own.” Previously, testing the viewfinder—which allows users to control their distance to the subject, shutter speed, aperture size, and exposure levels—would have required custom code or renders in other tools, and still fallen short of an authentic experience.
Streamlining handoff between design and development
Having a single source of truth in Figma, plus the ability to easily inspect designs in Dev Mode, has translated into a much smoother handoff process—and higher-quality products. Before Figma, Tim notes, there were more than 50 different fonts used in the app. “Dev Mode has dramatically bridged the gap between design and development, accelerating QA and development cycles through efficient design system implementation,” he says. Before, designers would have needed to provide all assets, but now developers can directly export what they need, in the correct format.
With developers getting access to Figma much earlier on in the process, they can feel like true partners to their design counterparts. They can see what designers have annotated, use variables to change screen sizes, and see how potential properties and modes work together. Before Dev Mode, this would have required taking several screenshots to get a sense of how behaviors would feel in the browser.
Creating a sense of shared ownership
It’s not just product designers and developers jumping into Figma—the brand designers, art directors, creative directors, copywriters, and freelancers on the Creative Studio team have also been able to collaborate more seamlessly thanks to being in the same file.
If they’re working on a campaign—say, a new camera launch—they can work on different parts of the project in separate pages, while still having visibility into each other’s workflows. “For example, the art director and copywriter can work on out-of-home placements in their own page, and I can work on the creative toolkit for both internal and external partners,” explains Ryan Esquivel, Senior Designer at Polaroid. With everyone in the file, they’re able to give each other immediate feedback. “There’s the ease of being able to drop comments in, or fix something really fast,” he says. “It’s just made everything more efficient. I could not imagine it not being a part of what we do now.”
Ryan adds that being able to build the brand guidelines in Figma allows it to be a living document that more accurately reflects how work evolves. “It’s easier than sending a PDF, and it’s not a set-in-stone document,” he says. “If anyone finds a discrepancy along the way, we can edit it super easily.”
Chief Product Officer Stine Bauer Dahlberg appreciates how fluid and collaborative their workflows have become; it’s less obvious where one team member’s idea starts, and another ends. “Everybody’s building on each other to create a thing,” she says, “and everybody feels really invested in that thing succeeding.”
Everybody’s building on each other to create a thing, and everybody feels really invested in that thing succeeding.
Looking to the future
When it comes to building an emotional connection to users and developing new features, the team leans on both intuition and user data. The popularity of the Polaroid app’s built-in scanner, which allows users to digitize their instant photos, has inspired work on Instant Answers, an AI-powered feature that gives users photography pointers and answer common questions.
Should you “shake it like a Polaroid picture,” you might ask? In a word, no: Older, peel-apart film benefited from a shake, but today’s film is sealed behind a protective window. “We did train the algorithm on this one,” says Stine.
With handwritten fonts and warm, personable responses, Instant Answers is another callback to the heritage of the Polaroid brand, which set out to make photography a bit more tactile, intentional, and personal. And with its next era of innovation, Polaroid is bringing that sensibility into the digital space.
