The most useful piece of outdoor media in New York this week may be a stack of posters that people are allowed to take off the wall. Figma’s collaboration with Sanrio has turned construction hoardings and street-facing walls into a bright, character-led takeover, and the mechanic is as simple as it is effective: some of the artwork is designed to be removed.
The visual system
Across the campaign, the line “Figma is better with friends” repeats in large blocks of colour, broken by the faces of Hello Kitty, Badtz-Maru, My Melody, Keroppi and Pompompurin. The graphic approach is deliberately flat: heavy black outlines, saturated fills, oversized type. That is the correct choice for street-level media, because it stays legible at a distance and remains recognisable in peripheral vision while people walk past.
The characters do most of the work. Sanrio’s designs are among the most instantly read visual assets in the world, which means the campaign does not need to explain its own premise. A passerby registers the world of the characters first and the software brand second, and the association is the message: Figma is a place where this kind of playful collaboration happens.
The tear-away mechanic
Limited-edition tear-away posters, placed at locations including Lafayette Street and East 4th Street, invite people to lift a piece of artwork off the display and take it home. Photographs from the campaign show exactly that happening, with a passerby peeling a My Melody print from the wall.
This is experiential out-of-home without screens, sensors or production budget. It converts a viewer into a participant with one physical affordance, and it produces the behaviour that social platforms reward: people photographing themselves taking something, then posting it. The mechanic also solves a distribution problem, because the audience does the distributing.
There is a practical discipline behind it. Tear-away posters require a pad structure that survives weather and repeated removal, and they require placement where people can stop without blocking a right-of-way. The executions sit on hoardings and street-level walls rather than on busy crossings, which is the right call for an interaction that takes several seconds.
Scale variation, one identity
Beyond the poster walls, the campaign extends into a large pink banner reading “Figma is better with friends,” carrying the same characters at a much bigger scale. A single idea adapts across small-format street posters, construction hoardings and wall-mounted creative while keeping the visual language intact. That consistency is what makes the campaign feel like a local presence rather than a series of unrelated placements.
The QR code appears on several executions, linking the physical work back to the platform. The campaign also extends into FigJam, where temporary Sanrio-inspired interface elements bring the collaboration into the product itself, so that someone who encounters the street work can find the same visual world inside the tool.
The birthday pop-up
The street rollout connects to a Hello Kitty birthday pop-up planned for November 7 and 8, 2026, near Union Square. The dates and location come from the supplied campaign information, and visitors are advised to check the organisers’ official announcements before attending.
The pop-up completes the loop. Street media creates discovery, the tear-away creates a physical keepsake, the QR creates a digital handoff, and the event creates a reason for the community to gather in one place during the same week. Each element reinforces the others rather than repeating them.
Why it matters
Most brand collaborations in out-of-home are content swaps: two logos, one poster, no behaviour. This one gives the audience something to do, and it does so with a production technique that has existed for a century. The lesson is not that every campaign needs a gimmick. It is that interactivity in OOH does not require technology, and that a removable poster can generate more engagement than a screen, because the interaction leaves the audience holding something they want. For software brands trying to appear in the physical world without looking like they bought a billboard, that is a notably efficient model.
