Figma
Since Hello Kitty® first stepped onto the world stage in 1974, she and her friends have connected generations of fans through the spirit of togetherness and thoughtful design. Here’s how our shared love of craft and community shaped our collaboration with Sanrio®, in FigJam and around the world.
Share How we brought Hello Kitty® And Friends to Figma
Sanrio’s flagship character, Hello Kitty, has been a global cultural icon for over 50 years. She was created in 1974 and made her commercial debut on a small vinyl coin purse in 1975. Other familiar characters arrived over the years, and today, Sanrio’s wider universe includes more than 450 characters.
At Sanrio®, the company behind Hello Kitty® and Friends, nakayoku is a guiding philosophy. Roughly translating to “everyone getting along together,” the ethos is rooted in the belief that no one thrives in isolation and that sharing happiness brings people closer. The same spirit runs through Figma. Figma has always been multiplayer, from the first shared cursors in the browser to now designing with code on the canvas Today, code layers moves into open beta. Now teams can explore and build prototypes backed by code on the canvas. Here’s a look at everything we launched today to bring teams and agents, and the design, code, and context they work with, into Figma’s full-stack creative canvas.Design together with code layers on the canvas
Build by design: New workflows for new ways of building
“We saw an organic tie-in between how Sanrio brings people together and how we do,” Jordan Scott, Head of Community Experiences at Figma, says. Sanrio’s characters connect fans all over the world, and that sense of togetherness extends to the characters themselves, where Hello Kitty® is part of a larger circle of friends. “Hello Kitty’s stronger because she’s surrounded by this whole cast of characters,” Jordan says. “In Figma, our work is better because we’re all in the files, collaborating together.”
The attention to detail behind Sanrio’s thoughtfully designed characters also felt like a natural fit for Figma’s community of designers. That’s why we’re teaming up with Sanrio to bring friendship and play into FigJam and beyond. For one week starting on November 1, Hello Kitty and Friends will join you in FigJam, where you can choose one of 12 Sanrio characters to join your brainstorms. The celebration also extends to a free pop-up in honor of Hello Kitty’s birthday, taking place in New York City on November 6–8, along with community meetups around the world.
To introduce Hello Kitty and Friends to your canvas, just click Hello Kitty’s signature bow icon in the toolbar (pictured above) to choose a character. Each character has their own theme so your cursor, washi tape, and sticky notes change to match.
Making room for friends in FigJam
FigJam has always been a place where friends and colleagues can convene to express themselves (and their feedback) through features like music, creative stamps, and emojis, making it a perfect home for Hello Kitty and Friends. Getting each character settled onto the board took a lot of care, and the team that welcomed them in had help from some old friends: FigPals A tribute to our beloved FigPals—and a surprise way to keep them close forever.
Finding a forever home for FigPals
→ Click a character in the selection window to change its pose.
→ Release Sanrio®-themed confetti from the display of your three favorite characters on your Community profile.
→ See Hello Kitty pop up with confetti as the file loads with character mode enabled.
With some of the technical groundwork already in place, the product designers and engineers focused on making the experience feel distinct to Hello Kitty and Friends. “A lot of the work actually came from the nontechnical side,” says Cynthia Jia, a software engineer at Figma. “Figuring out what we wanted each character’s experience to look like and making it unique to Sanrio is what took more work.”
That work began with a difficult choice about which 12 out of hundreds of Sanrio characters would make it into FigJam. Figma product designers and engineers chose based on recognizability and popularity, landing on a cast that includes characters like Hello Kitty, My Melody, and Tuxedosam. With that decision made, it was time to imagine how far they could push the bounds of their creativity.
Slide 1 of 41 of 4Hello Kitty tosses confetti as your FigJam file loads.
Each character has a unique cursor featuring an icon tied to their story.
Your friends leaves their mark on FigJam with custom stamps and sticky notes in colors inspired by their story.
Sanrio®-inspired washi tape adds a playful touch to your FigJam board.The team began exploring how each character’s personality could come through in FigJam, drawing from hundreds of character illustrations, icons, and background images supplied by Sanrio. “It was so cool to have this massive library of assets at our disposal,” says Product Designer Samantha Mah. They had room to experiment, as long as the characters retained their proportions and relative sizes when scaled up or down.
The tools:The team leveraged a suite of Figma products to build the experience, including Figma Motion for a loading animation and the Figma agent for implementing smaller bulk edits.
For Amelia Goodman, a Figma engineer and longtime Hello Kitty fan, the fun was figuring out just how much delight they could bring to a tool people use for work. “There was so much room to play around and have fun with this project,” she says. That meant finding moments for play within the tool people already use to brainstorm and create together.
Users can feature their three favorite Sanrio characters on their Community profiles in an interactive Polaroid-style display with a custom background. Plus, Sanrio-themed community files like slide templates, coloring books, and a general playground file offer more ways to create and share with friends.
The team used Figma to turn Sanrio’s artwork into scalable vector assets and develop the details of each character’s experience. Sanrio supplied as many as 40 poses for some characters, from jumping and spinning to dancing. Then, the team chose which moves would become stickers and tucked in a little surprise, too: Click a character’s preview in the selection window, and it strikes a different pose.
From there, the team created character-specific washi tape and sticky-note palettes, naming the sticky-note colors after details from the characters’ backstories and friendships that superfans might recognize. For example, Pochacco’s color palette is named “Running Red” as a nod to his athletic character and Tuxedosam’s palette is called “Bowtie Pink” in honor of his bowtie collection, which is rumored to number in the hundreds.
Other details started to emerge as they built on one another’s ideas. A burst of confetti made up of small Sanrio-themed icons will appear with a click, and Hello Kitty will pop up to say hello as a file loads. Sanrio-themed selfie frames will bring the characters into FigJam’s photobooth widget, too.
Taking the celebration IRL
More than 60 community meetups around the world give designers a chance to make friends close to home. Hosted by Friends of Figma groups and Figma Campus Leaders, these casual gatherings focus on getting to know one another.
For Kelley Sauer, Manager of Experiential Events at Figma, bringing the communities together also meant giving them a place to meet. “There’s something special about being able to take a digital experience offline, so people can experience it in real life,” Kelley says. “Given the playful nature of Sanrio and their emphasis on friends and community, we knew something had to happen in person,” Jordan adds.
The celebration takes shape across New York City and beyond, from a free birthday pop-up for Hello Kitty near Union Square—where visitors can customize a mystery Sanrio character keychain, pick up exclusive swag, and order matcha from a Keroppi-green truck—to themed Friends of Figma gatherings around the world. The keepsakes tap into another connection between the communities: a love of collecting thoughtfully designed swag. Figma fans line up for new releases at Config, our annual conference Figma's Season 5 merch is full of surprises—smiling cubes, a tomato with arms, wooden shapes painted in gouache. We asked the eight artists behind the collection how they work, what inspires them, and what they created.Meet the artists behind Figma’s Season 5 collection
→ Sanrio character keychains wearing Figma T-shirts
→ Figma × Hello Kitty and Friends sticker packs featuring new artwork of Sanrio characters interacting with Figma glyphs
→ Limited-edition sweatshirts with three character patches of your choice, for the first 150 visitors each day
→ Collectible matcha truck cups with surprise character designs
Throughout, the team prioritized creating something that would feel as special to Sanrio fans as it did to Figma’s community. “We want to create an experience that’s going to bring our community joy as much as it brings Sanrio’s community joy,” Jordan says. “We think there’s probably a natural overlap of folks who are passionate about Sanrio and are also quite creatively inclined. Hopefully, this will feel exciting to them.”
The Old Friend photobooth in Manhattan, a popular 1970’s black and white analog photobooth, is joining the fun, offering Figma- and Sanrio®-themed photostrips from November 6–7.
Bringing two creative worlds together
Figma Brand Designers Chelsea White and Jefferson Cheng were in charge of making the New York City pop-up look the part. They shaped everything from the furniture and finishes to the signage, plus the ads and billboards inviting people to the party.
Jefferson started as he begins all projects: with a north star to guide him. “I wanted it to feel like it’s a marriage of these two brands that are very iconic and graphic,” Jefferson says of the Sanrio collaboration. “How do we present that in a way where it resonates with a designer audience?”
The two brands already had plenty in common. “There are elements from Sanrio that speak directly to our brand, with the bold shapes and colors of the characters,” Jefferson says. Bringing Figma illustrations together with Sanrio characters gave the team room to experiment within that shared language. “The Sanrio characters are built mostly from rudimentary shapes, and we use the spirit of those shapes in our brand as well,” he says. “When we marry them together, it makes sense.”
Slide 1 of 41 of 4
Posters around New York City zoom in the characters’ faces.
Hello Kitty® and Friends play on the Figma logo on a digital newsstand in NYC. 
Tearaway posters throughout New York City
A digital newsstand display in NYC where all the characters appear leaning on one anotherFor the posters and ads around New York City, Jefferson and Chelsea cropped tightly into the characters’ faces until they became almost abstract arrangements of shapes and color. “When you blow them up so big, it becomes an abstraction of the character, but there are also very recognizable elements,” Jefferson says. Even at that scale, a glimpse of Hello Kitty’s bow keeps her recognizable.
Chalk sidewalk stencils will appear around Union Square and the immediate area, giving passersby quick information about the pop-up and where to find it.
Inside the pop-up, they played with scale again, enlarging the tiny icons supplied with each character into a mural, including a strawberry associated with the popular rabbit character, My Melody. Up close, those little illustrations become giant graphics that show off the vector linework and shapes behind them.
The furniture was just as considered. Working with their agency partner, the team built tiered blocks for people to sit on together, carrying the bold shapes and contrasting colors of the graphics off the walls and into the room. “We played with really strong pops of color where Sanrio and Figma meet, so that they speak the same language in a really wonderful way,” Chelsea says. The result is a space that feels familiar to fans of both worlds, with room to sit down and make a new friend.
Our Sanrio collaboration includes:
- Hello Kitty and Friends in FigJam now until November 8
- A free pop-up party November 7–8, 10 am–6 pm ET, at 12 East 14th Street, New York
- Free Figma and Sanrio themed photostrips at the Old Friend photobooth from November 6–7, 10 am–10 pm ET, at 145 Allen Street, New York
- 60+ community meetups around the world through Friends of Figma and Figma Campus Leaders
Finding a forever home for FigPals
Digital tools, human expression: The visual identity behind Config 2026
How Figma AI tools helped us bring extra delight to the canvas