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Why Figma Wins

385 points by adriand 6y ago

kaelig 6y ago
I championed the rollout of Figma at my company and what this article mentions is true: this is a tool for design, not just for designers. We initially thought we'd need to provision the same number of licenses as we did for Sketch/InVision/Abstract. Turns out way more people started to get involved in the design process and we now have a more inclusive design practice. Content strategists, UX developers, researchers, can all participate early and often. (From a revenue perspective that's a pretty convenient thing for Figma, as each editor costs $45/mo — not only are they eating market shares from the existing pie, but they are also making that pie bigger)
- dyeje 6y ago
  This post encapsulates why Figma is winning, because there are thousands of teams doing this work dealing with the headaches of having design spread across multiple expensive tools. Figma just does it better.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
virgilp 6y ago
Meh. Everybody knew that "design is not just for designers" for quite a while, Adobe made several failed attempts at "collaboration" workflows trying to solve exactly those kinds of problems. This is just post-hoc justification... and also, let's not jump ahead of ourselves, "Figma wins" is not a foregone conclusion. A few years ago it would've been "why Sketch wins".
- kissgyorgy 6y ago
  Everyone knew cgroups and jails and sandboxes for a long time before Docker happened, still only Docker made these concepts popular for the masses.
  - virgilp 6y ago
    That's what I'm saying - if Figma wins (it's still a considerable if) - it's due to great execution, not some grand insight. I'm not dissing Figma, I'm disagreeing with the article about what makes it great.
paulsutter 6y ago
I wish Figma would add page formatting and links so that it could be used as a wiki also. Figma is on a much better track to make a good product than Notion.
- _nvs 6y ago
  Fun fact: Figma recently announced link/URL support I totally agree and have been moving my spec work from Notion to Figma too!
  - imjared 6y ago
    At a high level, how are you spec'ing in Figma?
- cateye 6y ago
  That sounds a lot like https://www.axure.com/ https://www.axure.com/ which was quite popular 10 years ago.
  - uxcolumbo 6y ago
    Axure beats Figma when it comes to wireframing and prototyping. Building enterprise apps means dealing with a lot of forms and grids and making these fully interactive is easier in Axure.
    - wx196 6y ago
      I think many people don't get why Axure is still popular is because they don't design for enterprise software. Sometimes it is just much easier to create table as a table and not as a bunch of vertical and horizontal lines like you will have to do in most of design software.
- kyawzazaw 6y ago
  I am really liking the figma integration in wiki for architecture diagrams and graphs. The dynamic auto update.
kitsunesoba 6y ago
Figma is a great piece of engineering, but I'm sticking with Sketch for personal use since it checks all of my boxes. I've been watching it though, because I'm curious to see if they'll ever switch away from Electron for their desktop app. As far as I can tell, it doesn't need much from the browser other than a canvas. A lightweight standalone webassembly+canvas runtime would probably be enough to run it with some tweaks and could net significant performance/efficiency improvements (especially if said runtime leveraged Vulkan, Metal, etc). If they do that, it'll grab my attention and may kick off a new way to build cross-platform high-performance desktop apps.
- mattlean 6y ago
  Just curious to know what those boxes are that Sketch checks for you. Right now, Sketch seems to be the prevailing product in the overall design community. But in my opinion it's only because it was the first to really get such a strong hold on its niche, and a new product will take its place at the top soon. What turns me off to it as a person who missed its initial spread is that the vanilla Sketch experience leaves a lot to be desired. It's cool that it supports plugins to extend its functionality, but I don't like how it's expected that you just have to get a bunch of plugins to reach parity with the vanilla features of its competitors. (The Mac only support is also a negative too, but it's not that big of a deal for me.)
  - kitsunesoba 6y ago
    I don't use many plugins. I mostly just need a reasonably capable, digital-first vector canvas to work on, and Sketch does that very well. It also helps that it's pretty easy on resources — when I first picked it up, my daily driver was a Core 2 Duo MacBook with 4GB of RAM, so back then efficiency was very important. These days I have access to much more powerful machines, but it's still nice that it can sit in the background with large projects open without impacting a browser with dozens of open tabs and mammoth apps like Xcode and Android studio. So for now, there's just not enough to gain from investing time and effort into moving over to Figma.
finkin1 6y ago
Figma can be shared with a link and has no version control. Multiple designers can work in the canvass without having to worry if everyone is working form the same version. To me, these were the advantages that got us to switch from Sketch to Figma.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  Figma can be shared with a link and has no version control. This is great for quick, informal design work, like prototyping with participants who aren't specialists. It's a double-edged sword, though. There are good reasons that professional creative workflows often include revision control and sign-off processes attached to distributing specific revisions outside of the internal team.
  - kyriakos 6y ago
    Exactly this, since designs are part of requirements, if they can be changed without the knowledge of all involved parties they can become a moving goal post and source of misunderstandings
butz 6y ago
Comparing pricing directly, looks like Sketch is cheaper, if company already uses Macs. But how does it compare in reality? Do developers need additional Figma licences, or can designers just share designs with them to inspect?
- 542458 6y ago
  Pure “viewer” licenses are free on figma. You only pay per editor. And IMHO the price delta between sketch and figma is basically a rounding error on the wage cost of your designers, so it’s barely even worth thinking about.
hypewatch 6y ago
Figma sounds like a great tool, but it feels overhyped to me - especially in this article. This reads like a long-winded pitch to a Figma investor more than an honest review. I’ve been wanting to try it out but this article was a little bit of a turn off because it is so enthusiastic. Every tool has strengths and weaknesses so an article like this makes me wonder, what are the trade offs?
- kyawzazaw 6y ago
  I am not a designer or someone who has tried other design software other than maybe Photoshop, Illustrator. It is really easy to get up to speed to a workable draft sketch so I suggest you just try it out and see.
- tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
  I'm a developer who has to dip into design files every now and then, so maybe my opinion isn't the most reliable. But I just don't really see a huge difference between Sketch and Figma. The major difference is that you can design online (which is admittedly a very big diff). But the UI itself doesn't really seem to set itself apart that much. Can anyone here lay out a few major differences that I might be missing?
  - scrollaway 6y ago
    At a high level, that's about it, and it is huge. Sketch is macOS only. Hell, this page comes up when you google "sketch for <not macos>": https://www.figma.com/sketch-alternative/ https://www.figma.com/sketch-alternative/
    - open-source-ux 6y ago
      "Sketch is macOS" I recently came across a Windows-only app called Lunacy which offers Sketch file import and editing for Windows users (I haven't tried the app). The published Sketch file specification [1] is what allows Figma and Adobe XD (and Lunacy) to import Sketch files. Ironically, neither Figma or Adobe XD publish their file formats. I think where Figma is pulling ahead of Sketch (in terms of usage behaviour) is that it is being used by more than just designers. In fact, Figma is beginning to encroach (possibly unintentionally) on digital whiteboard tools like Miro and Mural. [1] https://developer.sketch.com/file-format/ https://developer.sketch.com/file-format/
kyriakos 6y ago
My main issue with Adobe XD and I believe this is an issue with Figma as well is the fact that there is no versioning on shared designs. We found ourselves in this situation with Adobe XD a few times where the designs were delivered to the developer and after part of the implementation was done the designer pushed changes which made the implementation look as if it was no longer following the approved UI. I looked at Figma as an alternative but it seems to have the same issue unless this has changed. Can anyone confirm?
- kyawzazaw 6y ago
  I share different screens and version them.
  - kyriakos 6y ago
    That leaves versioning on designers side which means designer is the only one who can confirm the changes. This can lead to misunderstandings.
    - kyawzazaw 6y ago
      unclear what you mean by "designer is the only one who can confirm the changes". hopefully, I would assume there will be additional documentation that refers to a certain version that is approved --- > That leaves versioning on designers side how was versioning the designs prior to Figma? whose responsibility was it?
corytheboyd 6y ago
Not a comment about Figma really, but it has unfortunately become a trigger word for me. These are my observations from working with tech startup companies as a software engineer. Software solutions will never fix problems that are caused by people. Sketch, Figma, whatever the next design tool is. Google Docs, Quip, Notion. Trello, Pivotal Tracker, GitHub/ZenHub, Jira. I've gone through tool-switching fatigue with all of the above. Sometimes it doesn't matter much, other times it bogs us down with metawork for months as you figure out which features you gained, and more importantly, lost. Back to design. I have seen design die the same way every time. Product misuses design resources, effectively making them contractors that hammer out one-off pieces of work. Those pieces of work get nitpicked by some vocal minority holding a lot of clout, until the end result violates the framework that the designer created. This frustrates everyone over time. Designers are frustrated because the systems they built are ignored. Engineers are frustrated because they are adding new debt with every designed feature that has to rebuild parts of the world to make exceptions to systems work. Product is frustrated because they just don't get why things are slow after they delivered a clear design to the engineers. Let it all build up and people will start leaving your company. So yes, use Figma if it suites your company well. If you're reaching for it because your team is frustrated, maybe consider digging into that more before you swap out yet another piece of software for all the wrong reasons.
- doh 6y ago
  This is an interesting opinion. Can you share how would you design a proper structure so the above is not the case?
  - corytheboyd 6y ago
    I have my own "perfect world" solution that I can shed some light on, sure. It's built to address the concerns that I myself have observed, so it might not apply to all. Never just blindly follow the advice of a stranger on the internet :) Stop wasting time with high fidelity mocks. Engineers shouldn't need a picture perfect rendering of what product wants in order to implement it. The end result almost never ends up being an exact replication anyway for "reasons". Start doing both of these in parallel: 1. Free up design to build systems that can be used to solve problems. Have them work closely with engineering to ensure the vision will carry ALL the way through to implementation 2. Lean very heavily on low fidelity mocks to hash out the SHAPE of changes to product (inspired by Basecamp https://basecamp.com/shapeup/1.1-chapter-02 https://basecamp.com/shapeup/1.1-chapter-02) To use object oriented programming as an example, a design system is used in the concrete implementation of the abstract shape of the product requirement. When something doesn't fit into an existing abstraction, you refactor instead of fork.
staysaasy 6y ago
Our design team has churned off of all prior products and now uses Figma. I've consistently been impressed by the degree to which Figma appears to be completely trouncing InVision / Sketch / others with a superlative product. The standard trend in enterprise software is towards oligopoly, with a few strong incumbents that struggle to actually kill one another as their products converge over time. Most enterprise businesses focus primarily on sales/marketing as they grow, rather than doubling down on a product that can kill incumbents. The fact that Figma has done both is really impressive and as an enterprise product head definitely something that I admire.
tarikozket 6y ago
It wins because it works and it continues to release useful features.
hatsunearu 6y ago
I keep thinking of the anime figure line Figma whenever someone says Figma :V
mostlyjason 6y ago
Our designers use Figma but the licenses are so expensive that people on the product team can’t even make small changes or illustrate concepts. Additionally the UX has tons of hidden features making it hard for non experts to discover how to do simple things like export mockups. As a result the designers have a backlog of small busy work changes instead of focusing on the key design questions. No one else has licenses to make updates or knows how to use the tool. The product team has started using Whimsical which is easier to use and is more reasonably priced for people who only use it occasionally or need to quickly illustrate low fidelity concepts. Now we have two design tools to essentially get around UX and pricing problems.
- tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
  I love Whimsical. It's just so damn smooth and reliable. All that being said, I think wanting one tool to serve not just designers but also product teams is probably too high of an expectation. We don't blame developer tooling if designers have a hard time making small updates to demonstrate design concepts. They're different domains, so different tooling is expected.
- mrpigeonpants 6y ago
  If Product is editing designs, you have bigger problems than money. And there might be some causality there.
- wereHamster 6y ago
  > […] the licenses are so expensive that people on the product team can’t even make small changes or illustrate concepts I completely agree. I don't see the Figma files as an output that designers produce. I see it as a product on its own that people should be able to collaborate on. I'm not going to stop a designer from sending me pull requests. In fact, for small mundane updates I'd LOVE it, since it would take this burden away from me. In fact, our inhouse designers all have GitHub accounts, so in theory they are able to. But when I want to tweak a little thing in a Figma file, like adjust naming of the symbols, clean up icons, add more diverse examples of the content to document edge cases, or to have grounds for my next discussion with a designer or engineer, I'm not allowed to. Also quite often the thing that I want to do is not necessarily meant for designers, but for my fellow developers. Things like technical notes for implementation.
vosper 6y ago
We use Figma at work, and while it’s a nice tool I think it’s easy to fall (or maybe we just fell) into a kind of uncanny valley. The designs we get are close to realistic mockups of our actual UI, but are often not 100% there, and it’s the little deviations that can be quite distracting. Engineer: So are we changing the nav icons as part of this story, too? Designer: Oh, no, ignore that. I didn’t have our real icon set so I just grabbed some others Engineer: This modal doesn’t look like our normal modal, are we supposed to be building a new one? Designer: Oh, no, ignore that - I’m working on a design for a new modal and I just used that here Engineer: Ok, do you know our current modal doesn’t support X, so this part of the interaction won’t work? Designer: Oh, okay, I’ll go update the design I guess Etc... sometimes makes me wish for the days of Balsamiq / sketch style designs where the idea was to not try to make it photorealistic. Having said that I guess if you could get Figma completely in sync with your actual UI it’d be pretty nice. EDIT: I will add that the clickable mockups seem really helpful for our Design team when they're doing user testing, which is happening before the designs get to us. But this is not unique to Figma, InVision can do it, too.
- gfodor 6y ago
  Of course it’s leaky, but obviously the cases where engineers built the right thing on the first try because of the clear design are harder to measure. Also, look! Engineers are talking to designers.
  - vosper 6y ago
    > obviously the cases where engineers built the right thing on the first try because of the clear design are harder to measure. That's a fair comment. > Also, look! Engineers are talking to designers. I think most good teams have had engineers talking to designers since well before Figma :)
    - gfodor 6y ago
      Ah yep of course, I’m just pointing out that those kinds of back-and-forths, Figma derived or not, are a sign of a healthy org. A lack of grumbling around miscommunication often means that no communication is happening, not that it’s going swimmingly.
blululu 6y ago
Figma is a solid design tool for basic web/mobile apps, however I think that this post reads like a sales pitch more than an honest assessment of the product. The market for design tools is highly competitive, and the 'wins/winner take all' framework does not really apply here. Someone once remarked that every design tool is Photoshop and to a certain degree this is true. Consequently is is easy to clone/transpose the basic functionality/interactions and get teams to switch to a new product. (Think about the recent transition from Sketch to Figma). Companies like Adobe have done well by bundling a suite of complementary products to gain an edge however this is not trivial from a business perspective. Even with bundling the business is not winner take all. Figma is in many ways worse than Sketch, but collaboration is really helpful. That said, it is not that hard to spin up a competitor with React + Firebase in short order. As much as Figma is in vogue right now, I would rather put money on Notion in the long term. Internal documentation has much higher switching costs than design tools. Notion already has excellent support for Management/Teamwork. They could easily roll out support for prototyping Mobile/Web apps and start eating into Figma's market share.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
josefrichter 6y ago
Interesting opinions. But mostly opinions, not backed by any data. Those features that the author considers to be "winning bets", might not be winners at all. Actually some of them may be considered Figma's downsides and maybe it would grow faster having had done things differently.. It all may be down to being relatively reliable (not that common among design & prototyping tools) and keeping the right balance between adding some slightly advanced prototyping features and still keeping it overall rather simple. Obviously I don't know the truth. Just saying it might be just that, and people are happy with it despite being browser based and without anybody really needing collaborative designing..
simonbarker87 6y ago
I invested a lot of time a few years back learning to use Sketch and did really like it however half of our office are Windows so on a recent project where I took the lead on design (I'm a software engineer but it's a small team) I decided to use Figma and I was blown away, it was much easier to use than Sketch and I had to do very little Googling on how to achieve what I wanted. I then created the animations, shared it with the head of the team who would be using it, he gave me a few bits of feedback and I then shared it with the rest of my team with no OS related problems at all. Since I've been on furlough for the last 3 months and working on a new app for myself I jumped back over to Sketch (since I have a licence and have invested in some plugins) and I have to say I do not like it anywhere near as much as Figma, at this point I've only stuck with Sketch because of the extras I have purchased for it, once I feel got my money's worth from them I'll be over to Figma for everything.
satvikpendem 6y ago
Figma approaches design from an engineer's perspective. They have features like auto layout [0], swapping elements in a list, scaling multiple elements at once while preserving each aspect ratio, and so on. Can you imagine that if designers before this wanted to move an element in a list, they would have to move every single one instead of having some drag and drop swap functionality? That if they wanted to dynamically change a button size for the text inside it, like we can do easily on the web, they simply couldn't? Basically, Figma is turning design more into something like front-end development, doing things in a design program that engineers could do normally with code. This is because the developers of Figma are themselves coders rather than designers, so they know what real ease of use should look like (ironically). This is the fundamental corporate culture shift that is the difference between Figma and others like Sketch. Of course, you could go all the way and simply turn the design software into a web/mobile development framework, which is what software like Framer [1] does, which is literally a design software built on React, and it can spit out React code for you once you're done designing. [0] https://www.figma.com/blog/announcing-auto-layout/ https://www.figma.com/blog/announcing-auto-layout/ [1] https://www.framer.com/ https://www.framer.com/
- gridlockd 6y ago
  Soon enough it will be so complicated that designers will refuse to use it and its users will just become frontend developers. Just like what happened to HTML and CSS.
- taharvey 6y ago
  Figma approaches design from an investors point of view. Like most other web-SaaS tools, they aren't browser based because its better for the user. They sacrifice speed, native functionality, and usability for owning via server-side control over your wallet on a subscription plan. The startup market in no-longer customer driven. It is investor thesis driven.
  - satvikpendem 6y ago
    That is an odd way to put it if you had read the article. It notes that precisely because Figma was on the web that it was able to have collaboration features, have linkability to specific Figma files, and other such features, and thus serve the customer. As well, I am not sure how they sacrifice speed or usability exactly, when they even use Rust compiled to WASM in order to create the entire UI. I can concede that SaaS can be, in many cases, be merely investor driven, but I cannot concede that Figma is one of those. Even being investor driven, such as having a subscription business plan, is not bad for the customer per se, as a sustainable business is better than a dead one. Software costs money to make, and more importantly, to upkeep and add features too. I am not sure how you can expect one time fees, especially for enterprise software like Figma is (personal plans are free), in this day and age.
nailer 6y ago
Figma users: can it export CSS grid? Would love to start using autogenerated HTML/CSS but don't want to go back to 'display: block' and the hacks that invariably come with it.
- jbreiding 6y ago
  I think the terminal output is the figma viewer. I have a hard time seeing the point of the role and software if a front end developer has to hand translate the design to actual code or styling.
Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
I know and use both Sketch and Figma on a decent level, and I prefer Sketch over Figma. My only complaint to it is that it doesn't have Ubuntu version (I understand why, but still). To me, is main advantage of Sketch was how many tiny things they got right (before Sketch, I was using Fireworks), and this combined volume of tiny improvements resulted a huge advancement of user experience. Figma, on the other hand, innovated just one thing: made design online and collaborative. All other tiny niceties are mostly copied. So I prefer to support the guys who crack their heads and innovate. I also think that Sketch team knows about their main disadvantage, so a web editor for it looks to be in the works.
mnkypete 6y ago
You know why it won for me? It had a Windows version from the start, so our team (Mac/Win) could actually get work done, since most other tools are Mac only.
howon92 6y ago
Everything in this article makes sense to me. But sadly, I don’t know how useful it is to the aspiring founders who are trying to build a product right now. It’s relatively straightforward to see Figma’s success depended on these reasons but what will drive the success of the products that are getting built from scratch right now? I would love to see someone point out technical decision like “browser-first experience” but in 2020 version that’s fundamentally different from what everyone else is doing but will make sense in 2025 in retrospect.
ryanSrich 6y ago
I don’t think Figma winning is all that complicated. Designing for the web and mobile is more dynamic now. Designers are expected to show their ideas and produce interactive prototypes. No other design tool has the level of prototype control that Figma does. Figma is very bad for illustration, but as the industry has killed off any semblance of art or technique this doesn’t matter. What does matter is producing something clickable and animated. So Figma wins because it’s designed to solve the problem designers have now. Not 10 years ago like Sketch.
mratsim 6y ago
Coincidentally just when "Why Figma Wins" is #1 on HN, the NimConf (#2) is currently about Figma integration in Nim via Fidget: - https://github.com/treeform/fidget https://github.com/treeform/fidget - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB8Yt2dqZbo&list=PLxLdEZg8DRwTIEzUpfaIcBqhsj09mLWHx&index=15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB8Yt2dqZbo&list=PLxLdEZg8DR... - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23585006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23585006
memexy 6y ago
As a programmer I used to take the ability to manage my workflows as I saw fit for granted. It is amazing how much value there is in providing some level of programming capabilities to the average user. This post is essentially describing a workflow management system for designers. It's amazing Figma has unlocked so much value.
federico3 6y ago
Figma does not seem to tie into the OS UI primitives. What is the experience for visually-impaired users that need high contrast UIs or braille terminals?
coderintherye 6y ago
Could any designers here explain why they use Figma instead of Invision? I used Invision before and loved it (as a developer) for collaborating on creating mockups and putting them into reality. Now working with a team that uses Figma and helping them create prototypes is...painful. It seems great for creating the design itself but prototyping has been way harder with it than in Invision. I'm wondering if maybe we're just unfamiliar with the right way to use that part of the tool.
- arkitaip 6y ago
  I've been sketching, prototyping and designing UI for years and I just don't get Figma. It's just baffles me that people would work on this level of granularity (let's draw everything from scratch) instead of working with UI elements like buttons, text fields, etc. I feel like I'm missing something very fundamentally about Figma because every time I've used it I leave confused and frustrated.
- wyxuan 6y ago
  InVision has its share of problems. I'm disappointed in the lack of ability to easily control vectors using the alt key that all the other programs have plugins are rather lacking, wish they had more plugins in their library. design to code would routinely lop off things like gradients lacking in feature parity with figma, sketch <- strong point Animation features are def a strong point but these and a few other gripes are why I use Figma.
- josefrichter 6y ago
  InVision doesn't have any design features. It's just a prototyping tool, you need to import designs from somewhere. Figma is a bit like Sketch+InVision combined. With the InVision part actually better than InVision. There is also InVision Studio, which was their attempt on full-fledged prototyping tool, but it's largely abandoned now, always suffered with huge reliability and perfomance issues and never became truly usable tool. It's a pity, it looked very promising.
tambourine_man 6y ago
Does anyone actually like using Figma? Honest question. I’ve use it for collaboration a few times but found it painful. I’d much rather have used Photoshop and screen sharing if given the choice. I understand that this solution doesn’t scale though.
- shwoopdiwoop 6y ago
  Not in a hundred years could I imagine going back to Photoshop for doing product design. Figma is a joy to use. Photoshop is a slow, clunky thing of the past in this particular field of design.
  - tambourine_man 6y ago
    Interesting, to me Figma is dog slow, feature poor… I can’t imagine why people would use it.
- josefrichter 6y ago
  I like being able to combine drawing+prototyping in one place, with an easy way of sharing. Syncing from Sketch to InVision is still not great and prototyping in InVision is actually very limited and not exactly a pleasure to use either.
vvpan 6y ago
I do not work on a Mac or want to. So anything that praises Figma over Sketch I upvote. You might think that it's a shallow position but when a company decides to limit their product to only one platform there is a price they have to pay.
- josefrichter 6y ago
  That's because 99% of good designers are on Mac. That has never been a serious problem.
gcoguiec 6y ago
Also Figma is working on Windows.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
While the things pointed out in the article are true, I think all of those points are actually second to the fact that their engineers are top of the tops. I first learned about Figma from this blog post featured on HN, https://www.figma.com/blog/how-we-built-the-figma-plugin-system/ https://www.figma.com/blog/how-we-built-the-figma-plugin-sys.... I immediately thought how much I'd want to work there if I lived in the area. The fact that a startup took so much time to build things with intention, the fact that they tried multiple, months-long paths before settling on a solution, and the technical details of their solution were so well thought out - I was incredibly impressed. My point is you probably could have given the exact same business plan to 99 other companies, but without the engineering talent, and importantly the engineering culture, they would not have been nearly as successful. Kudos to the whole Figma team, I'm envious of what you've built.
mmcconnell1618 6y ago
One issue with using realistic mockups is that reviewers expect the actual product to match. Take the extreme case of Steve Jobs where he would compare Macromedia Director mockups down to the pixel with the actual products and complain if they weren't perfect. https://books.google.com/books?id=390ISyA-CUEC&pg=PA49&lpg=PA49&dq=steve+jobs+apple+mockups+macromedia&source=bl&ots=WX8Dko2Ojm&sig=ACfU3U3sob0iFdXCwpRtOOvi5jEdffw7gw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi1--q6t5HqAhVWoHIEHZ4BBK4Q6AEwAHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=steve%20jobs%20apple%20mockups%20macromedia&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=390ISyA-CUEC&pg=PA49&lpg=P...
andybak 6y ago
I went for a long period of time - after discovering Figma and thinking it was wonderful - of being unable to use it because I could never remember what it was called. I remember emailing colleagues, googling for "online vector editor" etc. To be honest I'm not sure it has sunk in even now. I just haven't needed it for a while.
- frosted-flakes 6y ago
  You must have thought it was just a figment of your imagination, eh?
uxcolumbo 6y ago
My concerns with these cloud only solutions is that you lose control and you are locked in. See what happened to creatives in Venezuela when Adobe had to cut off access because of some trade sanctions. If you're a freelancer I'd rather use native apps that have a perpetual license, like the Affinity apps. If you're part of a bigger team and need collaboration features or easier hand off to engineering teams then yes I think Figma is great.
627467 6y ago
Figma is great. The single biggest feature from figma is that it's shared/collaboration oriented by default. This is due to its online nature (compared to installable apps such as sketch, incision and xd). Not all designers like this, but I love how figma makes work available across design teams, and how components becomes easily usable. I discovered my colleagues work by accident all the time. Now, all this creates other problems, obviously: now designers also need to maintain interdependent assets just like software dependencies.
sizzle 6y ago
Can anyone explain why adobe XD's platform isn't dominating the design tools discussion? They keep improving it with the backing of Adobe (army of devs) and the expertise of creative cloud, along with their community design plugins and remote collab features they just added to the platform. I'm able to quickly mock up designs with ease.
- PascLeRasc 6y ago
  I think you hit the nail on the head why they're not winning - no one wants Creative Cloud.
- open-source-ux 6y ago
  Adobe were caught napping a little. Sketch built a big community of users with a focus on UI design. Neither Photoshop or Illustrator are optimised for these tasks. Sketch felt nimble and lightweight compared to Adobe's apps to a lot of designers. And it reflected modern designer workflows. The chance to break out of Adobe's embrace probably appealed to many designers too. Adobe realised they had no app to address the 'experience design' process. The result was a new app: Adobe XD. But XD came late to the game while Sketch's popularity and influence grew. The XD UI has clearly been influenced by Sketch. The sheer size of Adobe means that XD is being used (it comes as part of Creative Cloud, but it's also free for anyone to use to encourage takeup). But XD doesn't have 'mindshare' among many designers compared to Sketch or Figma. There is something similar playing out on the iPad. You would think that Adobe would own the digital painting space here. But they don't (at least, not yet) - it's Procreate that illustrators are flocking to use, not Adobe's Fresco which is playing catch-up.
m4rtink 6y ago
Thats simple - they are cute, reasonably expensive and widely posable, opening many photography options. Their equipment is also largely unterchangeable, so the more you have, the more combinations you can get - often definitely unexpected by their authors. And lastly, they cover most of poular anime and games, so there is a good chance you can get your favorite character in a cute poseable form. :) Oh, you didn't mean the poseable japanese action figures[0] made by the Good Smile Company ? [0] https://www.goodsmile.info/en/products/category/figma https://www.goodsmile.info/en/products/category/figma
greggman3 6y ago
Not a Figma user but I took a quick 10 minute look the other day. I have what is probably a dumb question. Is there any feature to export the designs into some code friendly format? I didn't see one. I only saw export to image. Maybe that's a good thing? I certainly don't want to bog designers down into the minutia of implementation ... maybe? But it seemed like such a waste to put all the constraints into Figma and then have to manually figure out where they all are and enter them into your UI framework of choice. I saw the code inspection feature where you can copy and paste values one at a time. I guess I'm used to automating this stuff as much as possible. The more automation, the more the designer can tweak things to their heart's content in the actual product. Of course I've mostly done games but some games have very complex UIs and if I didn't automate then every day would be the designers asking "move that 3 pixels right", "make that 4 pixels taller", "change the color to #fe83C7" etc... Note: I get a figma document is full of stuff not intended to make it into the final product. I've always handled that with labeling, naming conventions, etc and I've always setup some flow where the designer can press a button and see their results live in the dev product in a reasonably short amount of time so they can iterate. Is that something common in app dev?
wdb 6y ago
The problem that I have with Figma is that it just doesn't work at all when you don't have an internet connectivity. At least with Sketch you can keep working when you want to work outside in the park and you ran out of hot spot data.
ta17711771 6y ago
What's the best stack/methods to take a properly designed Figma prototype into a HTML5+CSS+maybe JS web app? (PWA)
luckydata 6y ago
I used Figma at my last gig and while some of it is really nice, I found the productivity sub-par compared to even Sketch which I don't like very much. It seems that every new generation of design tools does less than the one before and is less productive while delivering gains in areas that are at best a nice to have. I'm scratching my head in this regard.
tonyoconnell 6y ago
In 1995, to create web graphics, I learned how to use Adobe Photoshop. It was the first software (along with Notepad) I learned to make websites. In 98 Macromedia Fireworks was released as the first serious tool for creating graphics for the web. I started using it in 1999. It was awesome. It had symbols (a way to use common elements across my designs). I never understood why people continued to use Photoshop which is a photo editing tool to make websites. Adobe bought Macromedia and I used Adobe Fireworks for almost 20 years, even after it was discontinued. I waited a year for Sketch to add symbols. Then I switched from Fireworks to Sketch. I loved Sketch. I was very very happy to use such a lightweight and elegant design tool ... but then Figma came along. I really didn't want to switch from my favourite design tool but last year I understood it is just too amazing to ignore. I switched from Sketch to Figma in a day and now I have a design system.
FlashBlaze 6y ago
I'm mostly a front end dev and previously I jumped directly into code and implemented whatever I had in mind without any clear direction (which should not have been the case at all). But after hearing about Figma, I first created a mockup of what I had in mind and just straight up designed for 2-3 days till I was satisfied and then dove into code. Needless to say, it was a game changer as it increased my productivity as I had a clear goal in mind. I'm never going to delve straight into code w/o a clear design henceforth.
dakiol 6y ago
Interesting. I have a 2017 MBP, 16GB, 2.9 GHZ quad-core, and Figma feels terribly slow.
- bshimmin 6y ago
  I briefly had Figma, Zoom, and Slack (three workspaces) open at once on Friday on my Mac. My computer was more or less unusable and sounded very sorry for itself; it was sort of entertaining, baffling, and sad all at the same time. I ended up quitting Slack and asking the designer if she could show us the Figma stuff over screenshare on Zoom instead. Obviously multi-tasking is too much to expect these days.
hising 6y ago
All design tools lack the ability to design the most important part of an UI: state. I think Figma is an awesome tool for making good looking mockups, but as a tool for describing how the UI will actually work, it has the same flaws as all other tools for this. Storybooks are great but there is still need for endless discussions when converting fancy Figma designs to actual interactive components with state
- wx196 6y ago
  It depends on what you call "design". User flow, interactions, states, rectangles and colors or just rectangles and colors. If first, there are a lot of other tools, maybe not so hyped so you don't see them every day. Just to name a few: Axure, Justinmind, iRise, Indigo Design. Recent version of Adobe XD is quite a powerful tool as well. With the rise of rapid application development tools we possibly can add Bubble, Retool, Outsystems and similar tools to this list too.
fastball 6y ago
We used Figma to design our app[1] (and everything around the app), and real-time collaboration was truly invaluable as a fully remote team. [1] https://supernotes.app https://supernotes.app
hizxy 6y ago
Figma didn’t “fix” design collaboration, it just made it easier. If your org has poor design maturity then the tool doesn’t matter.
achow 6y ago
Love Figma! However, their enterprise licence is $45/month ($540 annually)! That is ludicrous for the functionality that the app provides. In comparison Microsoft or Adobe software (Photoshop is $250/annum) has immense amount of technology & man month behind - Photoshop has been in development since 1990, and Microsoft Office must be in development for similar amount of period and have perhaps 5K+ employees (wild guess).

385 points by adriand 6y ago

I championed the rollout of Figma at my company and what this article mentions is true: this is a tool for design, not just for designers. We initially thought we'd need to provision the same number of licenses as we did for Sketch/InVision/Abstract. Turns out way more people started to get involved in the design process and we now have a more inclusive design practice. Content strategists, UX developers, researchers, can all participate early and often. (From a revenue perspective that's a pretty convenient thing for Figma, as each editor costs $45/mo — not only are they eating market shares from the existing pie, but they are also making that pie bigger)

dyeje 6y ago
This post encapsulates why Figma is winning, because there are thousands of teams doing this work dealing with the headaches of having design spread across multiple expensive tools. Figma just does it better.
deleted 6y ago
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virgilp 6y ago

Meh. Everybody knew that "design is not just for designers" for quite a while, Adobe made several failed attempts at "collaboration" workflows trying to solve exactly those kinds of problems. This is just post-hoc justification... and also, let's not jump ahead of ourselves, "Figma wins" is not a foregone conclusion. A few years ago it would've been "why Sketch wins".

kissgyorgy 6y ago
Everyone knew cgroups and jails and sandboxes for a long time before Docker happened, still only Docker made these concepts popular for the masses.
- virgilp 6y ago
  That's what I'm saying - if Figma wins (it's still a considerable if) - it's due to great execution, not some grand insight. I'm not dissing Figma, I'm disagreeing with the article about what makes it great.

paulsutter 6y ago

I wish Figma would add page formatting and links so that it could be used as a wiki also. Figma is on a much better track to make a good product than Notion.

_nvs 6y ago
Fun fact: Figma recently announced link/URL support I totally agree and have been moving my spec work from Notion to Figma too!
- imjared 6y ago
  At a high level, how are you spec'ing in Figma?
cateye 6y ago
That sounds a lot like https://www.axure.com/ https://www.axure.com/ which was quite popular 10 years ago.
- uxcolumbo 6y ago
  Axure beats Figma when it comes to wireframing and prototyping. Building enterprise apps means dealing with a lot of forms and grids and making these fully interactive is easier in Axure.
  - wx196 6y ago
    I think many people don't get why Axure is still popular is because they don't design for enterprise software. Sometimes it is just much easier to create table as a table and not as a bunch of vertical and horizontal lines like you will have to do in most of design software.
kyawzazaw 6y ago
I am really liking the figma integration in wiki for architecture diagrams and graphs. The dynamic auto update.

kitsunesoba 6y ago

Figma is a great piece of engineering, but I'm sticking with Sketch for personal use since it checks all of my boxes. I've been watching it though, because I'm curious to see if they'll ever switch away from Electron for their desktop app. As far as I can tell, it doesn't need much from the browser other than a canvas. A lightweight standalone webassembly+canvas runtime would probably be enough to run it with some tweaks and could net significant performance/efficiency improvements (especially if said runtime leveraged Vulkan, Metal, etc). If they do that, it'll grab my attention and may kick off a new way to build cross-platform high-performance desktop apps.

mattlean 6y ago
Just curious to know what those boxes are that Sketch checks for you. Right now, Sketch seems to be the prevailing product in the overall design community. But in my opinion it's only because it was the first to really get such a strong hold on its niche, and a new product will take its place at the top soon. What turns me off to it as a person who missed its initial spread is that the vanilla Sketch experience leaves a lot to be desired. It's cool that it supports plugins to extend its functionality, but I don't like how it's expected that you just have to get a bunch of plugins to reach parity with the vanilla features of its competitors. (The Mac only support is also a negative too, but it's not that big of a deal for me.)
- kitsunesoba 6y ago
  I don't use many plugins. I mostly just need a reasonably capable, digital-first vector canvas to work on, and Sketch does that very well. It also helps that it's pretty easy on resources — when I first picked it up, my daily driver was a Core 2 Duo MacBook with 4GB of RAM, so back then efficiency was very important. These days I have access to much more powerful machines, but it's still nice that it can sit in the background with large projects open without impacting a browser with dozens of open tabs and mammoth apps like Xcode and Android studio. So for now, there's just not enough to gain from investing time and effort into moving over to Figma.

finkin1 6y ago

Figma can be shared with a link and has no version control. Multiple designers can work in the canvass without having to worry if everyone is working form the same version. To me, these were the advantages that got us to switch from Sketch to Figma.

Silhouette 6y ago
Figma can be shared with a link and has no version control. This is great for quick, informal design work, like prototyping with participants who aren't specialists. It's a double-edged sword, though. There are good reasons that professional creative workflows often include revision control and sign-off processes attached to distributing specific revisions outside of the internal team.
- kyriakos 6y ago
  Exactly this, since designs are part of requirements, if they can be changed without the knowledge of all involved parties they can become a moving goal post and source of misunderstandings

butz 6y ago

Comparing pricing directly, looks like Sketch is cheaper, if company already uses Macs. But how does it compare in reality? Do developers need additional Figma licences, or can designers just share designs with them to inspect?

542458 6y ago
Pure “viewer” licenses are free on figma. You only pay per editor. And IMHO the price delta between sketch and figma is basically a rounding error on the wage cost of your designers, so it’s barely even worth thinking about.

hypewatch 6y ago

Figma sounds like a great tool, but it feels overhyped to me - especially in this article. This reads like a long-winded pitch to a Figma investor more than an honest review. I’ve been wanting to try it out but this article was a little bit of a turn off because it is so enthusiastic. Every tool has strengths and weaknesses so an article like this makes me wonder, what are the trade offs?

kyawzazaw 6y ago
I am not a designer or someone who has tried other design software other than maybe Photoshop, Illustrator. It is really easy to get up to speed to a workable draft sketch so I suggest you just try it out and see.
tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
I'm a developer who has to dip into design files every now and then, so maybe my opinion isn't the most reliable. But I just don't really see a huge difference between Sketch and Figma. The major difference is that you can design online (which is admittedly a very big diff). But the UI itself doesn't really seem to set itself apart that much. Can anyone here lay out a few major differences that I might be missing?
- scrollaway 6y ago
  At a high level, that's about it, and it is huge. Sketch is macOS only. Hell, this page comes up when you google "sketch for <not macos>": https://www.figma.com/sketch-alternative/ https://www.figma.com/sketch-alternative/
  - open-source-ux 6y ago
    "Sketch is macOS" I recently came across a Windows-only app called Lunacy which offers Sketch file import and editing for Windows users (I haven't tried the app). The published Sketch file specification [1] is what allows Figma and Adobe XD (and Lunacy) to import Sketch files. Ironically, neither Figma or Adobe XD publish their file formats. I think where Figma is pulling ahead of Sketch (in terms of usage behaviour) is that it is being used by more than just designers. In fact, Figma is beginning to encroach (possibly unintentionally) on digital whiteboard tools like Miro and Mural. [1] https://developer.sketch.com/file-format/ https://developer.sketch.com/file-format/

kyriakos 6y ago

My main issue with Adobe XD and I believe this is an issue with Figma as well is the fact that there is no versioning on shared designs. We found ourselves in this situation with Adobe XD a few times where the designs were delivered to the developer and after part of the implementation was done the designer pushed changes which made the implementation look as if it was no longer following the approved UI. I looked at Figma as an alternative but it seems to have the same issue unless this has changed. Can anyone confirm?

kyawzazaw 6y ago
I share different screens and version them.
- kyriakos 6y ago
  That leaves versioning on designers side which means designer is the only one who can confirm the changes. This can lead to misunderstandings.
  - kyawzazaw 6y ago
    unclear what you mean by "designer is the only one who can confirm the changes". hopefully, I would assume there will be additional documentation that refers to a certain version that is approved --- > That leaves versioning on designers side how was versioning the designs prior to Figma? whose responsibility was it?

corytheboyd 6y ago

Not a comment about Figma really, but it has unfortunately become a trigger word for me. These are my observations from working with tech startup companies as a software engineer. Software solutions will never fix problems that are caused by people. Sketch, Figma, whatever the next design tool is. Google Docs, Quip, Notion. Trello, Pivotal Tracker, GitHub/ZenHub, Jira. I've gone through tool-switching fatigue with all of the above. Sometimes it doesn't matter much, other times it bogs us down with metawork for months as you figure out which features you gained, and more importantly, lost. Back to design. I have seen design die the same way every time. Product misuses design resources, effectively making them contractors that hammer out one-off pieces of work. Those pieces of work get nitpicked by some vocal minority holding a lot of clout, until the end result violates the framework that the designer created. This frustrates everyone over time. Designers are frustrated because the systems they built are ignored. Engineers are frustrated because they are adding new debt with every designed feature that has to rebuild parts of the world to make exceptions to systems work. Product is frustrated because they just don't get why things are slow after they delivered a clear design to the engineers. Let it all build up and people will start leaving your company. So yes, use Figma if it suites your company well. If you're reaching for it because your team is frustrated, maybe consider digging into that more before you swap out yet another piece of software for all the wrong reasons.

doh 6y ago
This is an interesting opinion. Can you share how would you design a proper structure so the above is not the case?
- corytheboyd 6y ago
  I have my own "perfect world" solution that I can shed some light on, sure. It's built to address the concerns that I myself have observed, so it might not apply to all. Never just blindly follow the advice of a stranger on the internet :) Stop wasting time with high fidelity mocks. Engineers shouldn't need a picture perfect rendering of what product wants in order to implement it. The end result almost never ends up being an exact replication anyway for "reasons". Start doing both of these in parallel: 1. Free up design to build systems that can be used to solve problems. Have them work closely with engineering to ensure the vision will carry ALL the way through to implementation 2. Lean very heavily on low fidelity mocks to hash out the SHAPE of changes to product (inspired by Basecamp https://basecamp.com/shapeup/1.1-chapter-02 https://basecamp.com/shapeup/1.1-chapter-02) To use object oriented programming as an example, a design system is used in the concrete implementation of the abstract shape of the product requirement. When something doesn't fit into an existing abstraction, you refactor instead of fork.

staysaasy 6y ago

Our design team has churned off of all prior products and now uses Figma. I've consistently been impressed by the degree to which Figma appears to be completely trouncing InVision / Sketch / others with a superlative product. The standard trend in enterprise software is towards oligopoly, with a few strong incumbents that struggle to actually kill one another as their products converge over time. Most enterprise businesses focus primarily on sales/marketing as they grow, rather than doubling down on a product that can kill incumbents. The fact that Figma has done both is really impressive and as an enterprise product head definitely something that I admire.

tarikozket 6y ago

It wins because it works and it continues to release useful features.

hatsunearu 6y ago

I keep thinking of the anime figure line Figma whenever someone says Figma :V

mostlyjason 6y ago

Our designers use Figma but the licenses are so expensive that people on the product team can’t even make small changes or illustrate concepts. Additionally the UX has tons of hidden features making it hard for non experts to discover how to do simple things like export mockups. As a result the designers have a backlog of small busy work changes instead of focusing on the key design questions. No one else has licenses to make updates or knows how to use the tool. The product team has started using Whimsical which is easier to use and is more reasonably priced for people who only use it occasionally or need to quickly illustrate low fidelity concepts. Now we have two design tools to essentially get around UX and pricing problems.

tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
I love Whimsical. It's just so damn smooth and reliable. All that being said, I think wanting one tool to serve not just designers but also product teams is probably too high of an expectation. We don't blame developer tooling if designers have a hard time making small updates to demonstrate design concepts. They're different domains, so different tooling is expected.
mrpigeonpants 6y ago
If Product is editing designs, you have bigger problems than money. And there might be some causality there.
wereHamster 6y ago
> […] the licenses are so expensive that people on the product team can’t even make small changes or illustrate concepts I completely agree. I don't see the Figma files as an output that designers produce. I see it as a product on its own that people should be able to collaborate on. I'm not going to stop a designer from sending me pull requests. In fact, for small mundane updates I'd LOVE it, since it would take this burden away from me. In fact, our inhouse designers all have GitHub accounts, so in theory they are able to. But when I want to tweak a little thing in a Figma file, like adjust naming of the symbols, clean up icons, add more diverse examples of the content to document edge cases, or to have grounds for my next discussion with a designer or engineer, I'm not allowed to. Also quite often the thing that I want to do is not necessarily meant for designers, but for my fellow developers. Things like technical notes for implementation.

vosper 6y ago

We use Figma at work, and while it’s a nice tool I think it’s easy to fall (or maybe we just fell) into a kind of uncanny valley. The designs we get are close to realistic mockups of our actual UI, but are often not 100% there, and it’s the little deviations that can be quite distracting. Engineer: So are we changing the nav icons as part of this story, too? Designer: Oh, no, ignore that. I didn’t have our real icon set so I just grabbed some others Engineer: This modal doesn’t look like our normal modal, are we supposed to be building a new one? Designer: Oh, no, ignore that - I’m working on a design for a new modal and I just used that here Engineer: Ok, do you know our current modal doesn’t support X, so this part of the interaction won’t work? Designer: Oh, okay, I’ll go update the design I guess Etc... sometimes makes me wish for the days of Balsamiq / sketch style designs where the idea was to not try to make it photorealistic. Having said that I guess if you could get Figma completely in sync with your actual UI it’d be pretty nice. EDIT: I will add that the clickable mockups seem really helpful for our Design team when they're doing user testing, which is happening before the designs get to us. But this is not unique to Figma, InVision can do it, too.

gfodor 6y ago
Of course it’s leaky, but obviously the cases where engineers built the right thing on the first try because of the clear design are harder to measure. Also, look! Engineers are talking to designers.
- vosper 6y ago
  > obviously the cases where engineers built the right thing on the first try because of the clear design are harder to measure. That's a fair comment. > Also, look! Engineers are talking to designers. I think most good teams have had engineers talking to designers since well before Figma :)
  - gfodor 6y ago
    Ah yep of course, I’m just pointing out that those kinds of back-and-forths, Figma derived or not, are a sign of a healthy org. A lack of grumbling around miscommunication often means that no communication is happening, not that it’s going swimmingly.

blululu 6y ago

Figma is a solid design tool for basic web/mobile apps, however I think that this post reads like a sales pitch more than an honest assessment of the product. The market for design tools is highly competitive, and the 'wins/winner take all' framework does not really apply here. Someone once remarked that every design tool is Photoshop and to a certain degree this is true. Consequently is is easy to clone/transpose the basic functionality/interactions and get teams to switch to a new product. (Think about the recent transition from Sketch to Figma). Companies like Adobe have done well by bundling a suite of complementary products to gain an edge however this is not trivial from a business perspective. Even with bundling the business is not winner take all. Figma is in many ways worse than Sketch, but collaboration is really helpful. That said, it is not that hard to spin up a competitor with React + Firebase in short order. As much as Figma is in vogue right now, I would rather put money on Notion in the long term. Internal documentation has much higher switching costs than design tools. Notion already has excellent support for Management/Teamwork. They could easily roll out support for prototyping Mobile/Web apps and start eating into Figma's market share.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

josefrichter 6y ago

Interesting opinions. But mostly opinions, not backed by any data. Those features that the author considers to be "winning bets", might not be winners at all. Actually some of them may be considered Figma's downsides and maybe it would grow faster having had done things differently.. It all may be down to being relatively reliable (not that common among design & prototyping tools) and keeping the right balance between adding some slightly advanced prototyping features and still keeping it overall rather simple. Obviously I don't know the truth. Just saying it might be just that, and people are happy with it despite being browser based and without anybody really needing collaborative designing..

simonbarker87 6y ago

I invested a lot of time a few years back learning to use Sketch and did really like it however half of our office are Windows so on a recent project where I took the lead on design (I'm a software engineer but it's a small team) I decided to use Figma and I was blown away, it was much easier to use than Sketch and I had to do very little Googling on how to achieve what I wanted. I then created the animations, shared it with the head of the team who would be using it, he gave me a few bits of feedback and I then shared it with the rest of my team with no OS related problems at all. Since I've been on furlough for the last 3 months and working on a new app for myself I jumped back over to Sketch (since I have a licence and have invested in some plugins) and I have to say I do not like it anywhere near as much as Figma, at this point I've only stuck with Sketch because of the extras I have purchased for it, once I feel got my money's worth from them I'll be over to Figma for everything.

satvikpendem 6y ago

Figma approaches design from an engineer's perspective. They have features like auto layout [0], swapping elements in a list, scaling multiple elements at once while preserving each aspect ratio, and so on. Can you imagine that if designers before this wanted to move an element in a list, they would have to move every single one instead of having some drag and drop swap functionality? That if they wanted to dynamically change a button size for the text inside it, like we can do easily on the web, they simply couldn't? Basically, Figma is turning design more into something like front-end development, doing things in a design program that engineers could do normally with code. This is because the developers of Figma are themselves coders rather than designers, so they know what real ease of use should look like (ironically). This is the fundamental corporate culture shift that is the difference between Figma and others like Sketch. Of course, you could go all the way and simply turn the design software into a web/mobile development framework, which is what software like Framer [1] does, which is literally a design software built on React, and it can spit out React code for you once you're done designing. [0] https://www.figma.com/blog/announcing-auto-layout/ https://www.figma.com/blog/announcing-auto-layout/ [1] https://www.framer.com/ https://www.framer.com/

gridlockd 6y ago
Soon enough it will be so complicated that designers will refuse to use it and its users will just become frontend developers. Just like what happened to HTML and CSS.
taharvey 6y ago
Figma approaches design from an investors point of view. Like most other web-SaaS tools, they aren't browser based because its better for the user. They sacrifice speed, native functionality, and usability for owning via server-side control over your wallet on a subscription plan. The startup market in no-longer customer driven. It is investor thesis driven.
- satvikpendem 6y ago
  That is an odd way to put it if you had read the article. It notes that precisely because Figma was on the web that it was able to have collaboration features, have linkability to specific Figma files, and other such features, and thus serve the customer. As well, I am not sure how they sacrifice speed or usability exactly, when they even use Rust compiled to WASM in order to create the entire UI. I can concede that SaaS can be, in many cases, be merely investor driven, but I cannot concede that Figma is one of those. Even being investor driven, such as having a subscription business plan, is not bad for the customer per se, as a sustainable business is better than a dead one. Software costs money to make, and more importantly, to upkeep and add features too. I am not sure how you can expect one time fees, especially for enterprise software like Figma is (personal plans are free), in this day and age.

nailer 6y ago

Figma users: can it export CSS grid? Would love to start using autogenerated HTML/CSS but don't want to go back to 'display: block' and the hacks that invariably come with it.

jbreiding 6y ago
I think the terminal output is the figma viewer. I have a hard time seeing the point of the role and software if a front end developer has to hand translate the design to actual code or styling.

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago

I know and use both Sketch and Figma on a decent level, and I prefer Sketch over Figma. My only complaint to it is that it doesn't have Ubuntu version (I understand why, but still). To me, is main advantage of Sketch was how many tiny things they got right (before Sketch, I was using Fireworks), and this combined volume of tiny improvements resulted a huge advancement of user experience. Figma, on the other hand, innovated just one thing: made design online and collaborative. All other tiny niceties are mostly copied. So I prefer to support the guys who crack their heads and innovate. I also think that Sketch team knows about their main disadvantage, so a web editor for it looks to be in the works.

mnkypete 6y ago

You know why it won for me? It had a Windows version from the start, so our team (Mac/Win) could actually get work done, since most other tools are Mac only.

howon92 6y ago

Everything in this article makes sense to me. But sadly, I don’t know how useful it is to the aspiring founders who are trying to build a product right now. It’s relatively straightforward to see Figma’s success depended on these reasons but what will drive the success of the products that are getting built from scratch right now? I would love to see someone point out technical decision like “browser-first experience” but in 2020 version that’s fundamentally different from what everyone else is doing but will make sense in 2025 in retrospect.

ryanSrich 6y ago

I don’t think Figma winning is all that complicated. Designing for the web and mobile is more dynamic now. Designers are expected to show their ideas and produce interactive prototypes. No other design tool has the level of prototype control that Figma does. Figma is very bad for illustration, but as the industry has killed off any semblance of art or technique this doesn’t matter. What does matter is producing something clickable and animated. So Figma wins because it’s designed to solve the problem designers have now. Not 10 years ago like Sketch.

mratsim 6y ago

Coincidentally just when "Why Figma Wins" is #1 on HN, the NimConf (#2) is currently about Figma integration in Nim via Fidget: - https://github.com/treeform/fidget https://github.com/treeform/fidget - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB8Yt2dqZbo&list=PLxLdEZg8DRwTIEzUpfaIcBqhsj09mLWHx&index=15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB8Yt2dqZbo&list=PLxLdEZg8DR... - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23585006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23585006

memexy 6y ago

As a programmer I used to take the ability to manage my workflows as I saw fit for granted. It is amazing how much value there is in providing some level of programming capabilities to the average user. This post is essentially describing a workflow management system for designers. It's amazing Figma has unlocked so much value.

federico3 6y ago

Figma does not seem to tie into the OS UI primitives. What is the experience for visually-impaired users that need high contrast UIs or braille terminals?

coderintherye 6y ago

Could any designers here explain why they use Figma instead of Invision? I used Invision before and loved it (as a developer) for collaborating on creating mockups and putting them into reality. Now working with a team that uses Figma and helping them create prototypes is...painful. It seems great for creating the design itself but prototyping has been way harder with it than in Invision. I'm wondering if maybe we're just unfamiliar with the right way to use that part of the tool.

arkitaip 6y ago
I've been sketching, prototyping and designing UI for years and I just don't get Figma. It's just baffles me that people would work on this level of granularity (let's draw everything from scratch) instead of working with UI elements like buttons, text fields, etc. I feel like I'm missing something very fundamentally about Figma because every time I've used it I leave confused and frustrated.
wyxuan 6y ago
InVision has its share of problems. I'm disappointed in the lack of ability to easily control vectors using the alt key that all the other programs have plugins are rather lacking, wish they had more plugins in their library. design to code would routinely lop off things like gradients lacking in feature parity with figma, sketch <- strong point Animation features are def a strong point but these and a few other gripes are why I use Figma.
josefrichter 6y ago
InVision doesn't have any design features. It's just a prototyping tool, you need to import designs from somewhere. Figma is a bit like Sketch+InVision combined. With the InVision part actually better than InVision. There is also InVision Studio, which was their attempt on full-fledged prototyping tool, but it's largely abandoned now, always suffered with huge reliability and perfomance issues and never became truly usable tool. It's a pity, it looked very promising.

tambourine_man 6y ago

Does anyone actually like using Figma? Honest question. I’ve use it for collaboration a few times but found it painful. I’d much rather have used Photoshop and screen sharing if given the choice. I understand that this solution doesn’t scale though.

shwoopdiwoop 6y ago
Not in a hundred years could I imagine going back to Photoshop for doing product design. Figma is a joy to use. Photoshop is a slow, clunky thing of the past in this particular field of design.
- tambourine_man 6y ago
  Interesting, to me Figma is dog slow, feature poor… I can’t imagine why people would use it.
josefrichter 6y ago
I like being able to combine drawing+prototyping in one place, with an easy way of sharing. Syncing from Sketch to InVision is still not great and prototyping in InVision is actually very limited and not exactly a pleasure to use either.

vvpan 6y ago

I do not work on a Mac or want to. So anything that praises Figma over Sketch I upvote. You might think that it's a shallow position but when a company decides to limit their product to only one platform there is a price they have to pay.

josefrichter 6y ago
That's because 99% of good designers are on Mac. That has never been a serious problem.

gcoguiec 6y ago

Also Figma is working on Windows.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

While the things pointed out in the article are true, I think all of those points are actually second to the fact that their engineers are top of the tops. I first learned about Figma from this blog post featured on HN, https://www.figma.com/blog/how-we-built-the-figma-plugin-system/ https://www.figma.com/blog/how-we-built-the-figma-plugin-sys.... I immediately thought how much I'd want to work there if I lived in the area. The fact that a startup took so much time to build things with intention, the fact that they tried multiple, months-long paths before settling on a solution, and the technical details of their solution were so well thought out - I was incredibly impressed. My point is you probably could have given the exact same business plan to 99 other companies, but without the engineering talent, and importantly the engineering culture, they would not have been nearly as successful. Kudos to the whole Figma team, I'm envious of what you've built.

mmcconnell1618 6y ago

One issue with using realistic mockups is that reviewers expect the actual product to match. Take the extreme case of Steve Jobs where he would compare Macromedia Director mockups down to the pixel with the actual products and complain if they weren't perfect. https://books.google.com/books?id=390ISyA-CUEC&pg=PA49&lpg=PA49&dq=steve+jobs+apple+mockups+macromedia&source=bl&ots=WX8Dko2Ojm&sig=ACfU3U3sob0iFdXCwpRtOOvi5jEdffw7gw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi1--q6t5HqAhVWoHIEHZ4BBK4Q6AEwAHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=steve%20jobs%20apple%20mockups%20macromedia&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=390ISyA-CUEC&pg=PA49&lpg=P...

andybak 6y ago

I went for a long period of time - after discovering Figma and thinking it was wonderful - of being unable to use it because I could never remember what it was called. I remember emailing colleagues, googling for "online vector editor" etc. To be honest I'm not sure it has sunk in even now. I just haven't needed it for a while.

frosted-flakes 6y ago
You must have thought it was just a figment of your imagination, eh?

uxcolumbo 6y ago

My concerns with these cloud only solutions is that you lose control and you are locked in. See what happened to creatives in Venezuela when Adobe had to cut off access because of some trade sanctions. If you're a freelancer I'd rather use native apps that have a perpetual license, like the Affinity apps. If you're part of a bigger team and need collaboration features or easier hand off to engineering teams then yes I think Figma is great.

627467 6y ago

Figma is great. The single biggest feature from figma is that it's shared/collaboration oriented by default. This is due to its online nature (compared to installable apps such as sketch, incision and xd). Not all designers like this, but I love how figma makes work available across design teams, and how components becomes easily usable. I discovered my colleagues work by accident all the time. Now, all this creates other problems, obviously: now designers also need to maintain interdependent assets just like software dependencies.

sizzle 6y ago

Can anyone explain why adobe XD's platform isn't dominating the design tools discussion? They keep improving it with the backing of Adobe (army of devs) and the expertise of creative cloud, along with their community design plugins and remote collab features they just added to the platform. I'm able to quickly mock up designs with ease.

PascLeRasc 6y ago
I think you hit the nail on the head why they're not winning - no one wants Creative Cloud.
open-source-ux 6y ago
Adobe were caught napping a little. Sketch built a big community of users with a focus on UI design. Neither Photoshop or Illustrator are optimised for these tasks. Sketch felt nimble and lightweight compared to Adobe's apps to a lot of designers. And it reflected modern designer workflows. The chance to break out of Adobe's embrace probably appealed to many designers too. Adobe realised they had no app to address the 'experience design' process. The result was a new app: Adobe XD. But XD came late to the game while Sketch's popularity and influence grew. The XD UI has clearly been influenced by Sketch. The sheer size of Adobe means that XD is being used (it comes as part of Creative Cloud, but it's also free for anyone to use to encourage takeup). But XD doesn't have 'mindshare' among many designers compared to Sketch or Figma. There is something similar playing out on the iPad. You would think that Adobe would own the digital painting space here. But they don't (at least, not yet) - it's Procreate that illustrators are flocking to use, not Adobe's Fresco which is playing catch-up.

m4rtink 6y ago

Thats simple - they are cute, reasonably expensive and widely posable, opening many photography options. Their equipment is also largely unterchangeable, so the more you have, the more combinations you can get - often definitely unexpected by their authors. And lastly, they cover most of poular anime and games, so there is a good chance you can get your favorite character in a cute poseable form. :) Oh, you didn't mean the poseable japanese action figures[0] made by the Good Smile Company ? [0] https://www.goodsmile.info/en/products/category/figma https://www.goodsmile.info/en/products/category/figma

greggman3 6y ago

Not a Figma user but I took a quick 10 minute look the other day. I have what is probably a dumb question. Is there any feature to export the designs into some code friendly format? I didn't see one. I only saw export to image. Maybe that's a good thing? I certainly don't want to bog designers down into the minutia of implementation ... maybe? But it seemed like such a waste to put all the constraints into Figma and then have to manually figure out where they all are and enter them into your UI framework of choice. I saw the code inspection feature where you can copy and paste values one at a time. I guess I'm used to automating this stuff as much as possible. The more automation, the more the designer can tweak things to their heart's content in the actual product. Of course I've mostly done games but some games have very complex UIs and if I didn't automate then every day would be the designers asking "move that 3 pixels right", "make that 4 pixels taller", "change the color to #fe83C7" etc... Note: I get a figma document is full of stuff not intended to make it into the final product. I've always handled that with labeling, naming conventions, etc and I've always setup some flow where the designer can press a button and see their results live in the dev product in a reasonably short amount of time so they can iterate. Is that something common in app dev?

wdb 6y ago

The problem that I have with Figma is that it just doesn't work at all when you don't have an internet connectivity. At least with Sketch you can keep working when you want to work outside in the park and you ran out of hot spot data.

ta17711771 6y ago

What's the best stack/methods to take a properly designed Figma prototype into a HTML5+CSS+maybe JS web app? (PWA)

luckydata 6y ago

I used Figma at my last gig and while some of it is really nice, I found the productivity sub-par compared to even Sketch which I don't like very much. It seems that every new generation of design tools does less than the one before and is less productive while delivering gains in areas that are at best a nice to have. I'm scratching my head in this regard.

tonyoconnell 6y ago

In 1995, to create web graphics, I learned how to use Adobe Photoshop. It was the first software (along with Notepad) I learned to make websites. In 98 Macromedia Fireworks was released as the first serious tool for creating graphics for the web. I started using it in 1999. It was awesome. It had symbols (a way to use common elements across my designs). I never understood why people continued to use Photoshop which is a photo editing tool to make websites. Adobe bought Macromedia and I used Adobe Fireworks for almost 20 years, even after it was discontinued. I waited a year for Sketch to add symbols. Then I switched from Fireworks to Sketch. I loved Sketch. I was very very happy to use such a lightweight and elegant design tool ... but then Figma came along. I really didn't want to switch from my favourite design tool but last year I understood it is just too amazing to ignore. I switched from Sketch to Figma in a day and now I have a design system.

FlashBlaze 6y ago

I'm mostly a front end dev and previously I jumped directly into code and implemented whatever I had in mind without any clear direction (which should not have been the case at all). But after hearing about Figma, I first created a mockup of what I had in mind and just straight up designed for 2-3 days till I was satisfied and then dove into code. Needless to say, it was a game changer as it increased my productivity as I had a clear goal in mind. I'm never going to delve straight into code w/o a clear design henceforth.

dakiol 6y ago

Interesting. I have a 2017 MBP, 16GB, 2.9 GHZ quad-core, and Figma feels terribly slow.

bshimmin 6y ago
I briefly had Figma, Zoom, and Slack (three workspaces) open at once on Friday on my Mac. My computer was more or less unusable and sounded very sorry for itself; it was sort of entertaining, baffling, and sad all at the same time. I ended up quitting Slack and asking the designer if she could show us the Figma stuff over screenshare on Zoom instead. Obviously multi-tasking is too much to expect these days.

hising 6y ago

All design tools lack the ability to design the most important part of an UI: state. I think Figma is an awesome tool for making good looking mockups, but as a tool for describing how the UI will actually work, it has the same flaws as all other tools for this. Storybooks are great but there is still need for endless discussions when converting fancy Figma designs to actual interactive components with state

wx196 6y ago
It depends on what you call "design". User flow, interactions, states, rectangles and colors or just rectangles and colors. If first, there are a lot of other tools, maybe not so hyped so you don't see them every day. Just to name a few: Axure, Justinmind, iRise, Indigo Design. Recent version of Adobe XD is quite a powerful tool as well. With the rise of rapid application development tools we possibly can add Bubble, Retool, Outsystems and similar tools to this list too.

fastball 6y ago

We used Figma to design our app[1] (and everything around the app), and real-time collaboration was truly invaluable as a fully remote team. [1] https://supernotes.app https://supernotes.app

hizxy 6y ago

Figma didn’t “fix” design collaboration, it just made it easier. If your org has poor design maturity then the tool doesn’t matter.

achow 6y ago

Love Figma! However, their enterprise licence is $45/month ($540 annually)! That is ludicrous for the functionality that the app provides. In comparison Microsoft or Adobe software (Photoshop is $250/annum) has immense amount of technology & man month behind - Photoshop has been in development since 1990, and Microsoft Office must be in development for similar amount of period and have perhaps 5K+ employees (wild guess).