Philadelphia Designer's Free Figma Tools Gain 2,300+ Users, Winning AI Awards

Tianci Gong sits in Philadelphia, working as an AI interaction designer at EY, but his real work happens in the margins—in the tools he builds for other designers in his spare time. Since February 2025, he has released two open-source utilities on Figma Community, the collaborative platform where millions of digital product designers spend their days. The first, a Pros and Cons widget, lets design teams document their decisions and the reasoning behind them in a structured way. The second, the Random Chart Line Generator, automates the tedious work of creating data visualization elements for enterprise dashboards and financial applications. These are not glamorous projects. They are not the kind of work that gets framed on a wall. They are the kind of work that saves someone three hours on a Tuesday afternoon.

Over sixteen months, these two tools have accumulated more than 2,300 users across the Figma ecosystem. The growth has been organic—no marketing blitz, no paid promotion. Design practitioners at major North American technology companies have adopted them into their daily workflows. Third-party analytics from Fig Stats confirm the steady uptick: more saves, more positive comments, more people discovering them and deciding they are worth keeping.

Gong's motivation came from watching the profession he works in every day. Designers were drowning in repetitive tasks—manually drawing chart lines, struggling to articulate why they made the choices they made. The work was necessary but soul-crushing, the kind of thing that could be automated if someone took the time to build the right tool. "I noticed many designers were bogged down by repetitive work," Gong explained. "That motivated me to create lightweight, seamless solutions that fit naturally into designers' existing workflows." The tools are free. Anyone can use them. There is no paywall, no freemium model, no upsell waiting at the end.

This work has earned him recognition beyond the design community. His AI-powered wellness application, called Nutrica, won three Gold Awards at the 2026 Muse Creative Awards, the Tokyo Design Awards, and the Vega Digital Awards. It also claimed two Silver Awards at other major international design competitions. Individually, Gong received the Silver Award for Outstanding AI Experience Designer at the New York Digital Awards. These accolades establish him not just as a tool-builder but as someone thinking seriously about how AI can serve human needs—in this case, health and wellness.

Gong holds a Master of Fine Arts in Interaction Design from the School of Visual Arts and has spent six years working in the U.S. digital design industry. His approach is unusual. Most designers build portfolios of finished work—websites, apps, interfaces they can point to and say, "I made that." Gong has chosen instead to focus on the infrastructure beneath the work, on making the profession itself more efficient. His tools are described by users as intuitive, well-designed, and genuinely valuable for streamlining both the design review process and the creation process itself. They address a real problem that real people face every day.

What Gong represents is a shift in how design talent can contribute to the industry. Rather than concentrating solely on end-user interfaces, he has carved out a path of building for designers themselves—creating the scaffolding that allows others to work faster, smarter, with less friction. The tools are public, accessible, and free. They signal something larger: that the future of design infrastructure may not come from corporate platforms alone, but from practitioners within the community who see a gap and fill it. Gong will continue advancing in AI interaction design, digital wellness solutions, and enterprise design systems—the sectors where better tools and better thinking can genuinely move the needle.