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Not a designer but an engineer that reads designs, and Figma really is a game changer. High quality collaborative designs, great UX, and rather inexpensive to

Not a designer but an engineer that reads designs, and Figma really is a game changer. High quality collaborative designs, great UX, and rather inexpensive to users. Exactly what Adobe would need to stay relevant because they’re usually the opposite on these fronts :-) I can’t see switching being too realistic. $20 billion is a lot of money. That’s worth more than Cloudflare, Snap, Spotify, and just $3b shy of Zoom’s current market cap.

ableal 4y ago
For scale: EV maker Lucid is worth 24 billion, and Apple recently had twice that in cash reserve. (Looked it up because of an unfounded rumor linking both.)
scarface74 4y ago
Snap is losing money and doesn’t seem to have any path toward any decent profitability. Spotify is a low margin business since no matter how much it makes in revenue, it will always have to give 70% to the labels - a company with high marginal costs that scales with revenue is the opposite of a successful tech company. Cloud flare is also losing money. Why would any of these companies besides Zoom be considered a successful company that should have a high valuation?
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
Yeah, I think the biggest improvement Figma made is that it made it so much easier to share and collaborate on artifacts from design with the engineering team. The previous process we used for taking Sketch designs and turning then into running apps was much more painful and cumbersome.
- robertoandred 4y ago
  Except getting assets out of Figma is a huge pain. Trying to select the layers you need (if even possible), not being able to flatten layers into an exported image, not being able to compress the exported image...
  - the_mar 4y ago
    Uhhh what? Sounds like you just throw everything in figma file without using artboards or components. What do you mean you can’t flatten layers? Isn’t it what “exporting an image” is? You can absolutely compress the exported image, well you can decide whether you want to export it at 1x 2x etc. It’s a bit different from changing dpi but honestly using figma for print is rough
    - robertoandred 4y ago
      Sometimes the artboards, components, or whatever the structure in use is doesn't match up with dev needs. Sometimes you need things split up, sometimes you need them flattened. It's just not flexible. And 1x 2x etc isn't compression. I want a quality slider for JPGs, an 8-bit option for PNGs, I want to explicitly set the output resolution, I want to know how large the original source file is, how it's being cropped, etc.
      - the_mar 4y ago
        "Sometimes the artboards, components, or whatever the structure in use is doesn't match up with dev needs" - this really sounds like you should tell your designers. "how it's being cropped" - it's not being cropped. "I want to explicitly set the output resolution" - why tho? I ask because I found the lack of ability to set resolution as pretty jarring, however to my surprise I never needed it for digital assets
        robertoandred 4y ago
        Figma can absolutely crop images, and sometimes you want to know how much of an image is actually available. And why wouldn't you want to set the resolution? Appropriately sized images are part of proper compression and performance tuning. And you don't always have time to go back to the design team and ask them to rework tons of comps just because you need to get an asset out of a Figma.
        4y ago
jayd16 4y ago
I found Figma docs thrown over the wall from designers pretty hard to consume. Perhaps it was just how that particular design team used it but - they put a huge amount of information in a single document. - lots of sticky note style additions that were not clearly associated with what they referred to. - hard to search. - hard to determine what a single unit of work could be. Again, maybe this was the team but they didn't have a concept of discrete tasking. It was just "here's the giant figma doc with everything from p0s to stuff we might not even want" What are the upsides?
- kgeist 4y ago
  Interesting, we have a similar situation. A lot of information all at once, hard to navigate, search etc. Usually developers are so confused a figma doc is often used more like a prototype to show during a demo than a spec to share. Instead our designers make screenshots of it and put them in a well-organized Confluence document. I don't know what's the right way.
The5thElephant 4y ago
Figma will never be good at dev handoff because it isn't built on HTML/CSS rendering, so its code output is awful. No plugin or interpretation layer can fix this. CSS is the language of design, yet for some reason every design tool completely ignores it. Every top feature request on the Figma Forums is for HTML/CSS type features. We need a design tool built from the ground up on HTML/CSS rendering that has a Figma-like interface. Framer and Plasmic are sort of like this except made the mistake of wrapping everything in React code with tons of unnecessary abstractions that make the HTML/CSS output really messy. I like the attitude relate.app (now Rainbow) has, but I don't see Figma being the final design tool, particularly when working with developers.
- rosywoozlechan 4y ago
  > CSS is the language of design, yet for some reason every design tool completely ignores it. Maybe for web development, but people use Figma for mobile app designs too and those do not for the most part use CSS as the language for design.
  - The5thElephant 4y ago
    But CSS would still get you better prototypes that imitate native designs than anything Figma can provide. All the top requested features for Figma are CSS-like features even coming from designers who don't know CSS. CSS has solved many of the most difficult layout and design problems, why reinvent the wheel? I work on native app designs and other non-product design work in Figma and having the features CSS would provide out of the box would save me literally dozens of hours a month.
    - Existenceblinks 4y ago
      Yeah, auto-layout (flex) was weird at first but more and more designers get used to it, it becomes a preferable foundation for layout. I think they will love CSS eventually, it's just the teaching/learning process that can get them there. At least currently Figma hype gets them `display: flex`.
- 4y ago

ableal 4y ago

For scale: EV maker Lucid is worth 24 billion, and Apple recently had twice that in cash reserve. (Looked it up because of an unfounded rumor linking both.)

scarface74 4y ago

Snap is losing money and doesn’t seem to have any path toward any decent profitability. Spotify is a low margin business since no matter how much it makes in revenue, it will always have to give 70% to the labels - a company with high marginal costs that scales with revenue is the opposite of a successful tech company. Cloud flare is also losing money. Why would any of these companies besides Zoom be considered a successful company that should have a high valuation?

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

Yeah, I think the biggest improvement Figma made is that it made it so much easier to share and collaborate on artifacts from design with the engineering team. The previous process we used for taking Sketch designs and turning then into running apps was much more painful and cumbersome.

robertoandred 4y ago
Except getting assets out of Figma is a huge pain. Trying to select the layers you need (if even possible), not being able to flatten layers into an exported image, not being able to compress the exported image...
- the_mar 4y ago
  Uhhh what? Sounds like you just throw everything in figma file without using artboards or components. What do you mean you can’t flatten layers? Isn’t it what “exporting an image” is? You can absolutely compress the exported image, well you can decide whether you want to export it at 1x 2x etc. It’s a bit different from changing dpi but honestly using figma for print is rough
  - robertoandred 4y ago
    Sometimes the artboards, components, or whatever the structure in use is doesn't match up with dev needs. Sometimes you need things split up, sometimes you need them flattened. It's just not flexible. And 1x 2x etc isn't compression. I want a quality slider for JPGs, an 8-bit option for PNGs, I want to explicitly set the output resolution, I want to know how large the original source file is, how it's being cropped, etc.
    - the_mar 4y ago
      "Sometimes the artboards, components, or whatever the structure in use is doesn't match up with dev needs" - this really sounds like you should tell your designers. "how it's being cropped" - it's not being cropped. "I want to explicitly set the output resolution" - why tho? I ask because I found the lack of ability to set resolution as pretty jarring, however to my surprise I never needed it for digital assets
      - robertoandred 4y ago
        Figma can absolutely crop images, and sometimes you want to know how much of an image is actually available. And why wouldn't you want to set the resolution? Appropriately sized images are part of proper compression and performance tuning. And you don't always have time to go back to the design team and ask them to rework tons of comps just because you need to get an asset out of a Figma.
        4y ago

jayd16 4y ago

I found Figma docs thrown over the wall from designers pretty hard to consume. Perhaps it was just how that particular design team used it but - they put a huge amount of information in a single document. - lots of sticky note style additions that were not clearly associated with what they referred to. - hard to search. - hard to determine what a single unit of work could be. Again, maybe this was the team but they didn't have a concept of discrete tasking. It was just "here's the giant figma doc with everything from p0s to stuff we might not even want" What are the upsides?

kgeist 4y ago
Interesting, we have a similar situation. A lot of information all at once, hard to navigate, search etc. Usually developers are so confused a figma doc is often used more like a prototype to show during a demo than a spec to share. Instead our designers make screenshots of it and put them in a well-organized Confluence document. I don't know what's the right way.

The5thElephant 4y ago

Figma will never be good at dev handoff because it isn't built on HTML/CSS rendering, so its code output is awful. No plugin or interpretation layer can fix this. CSS is the language of design, yet for some reason every design tool completely ignores it. Every top feature request on the Figma Forums is for HTML/CSS type features. We need a design tool built from the ground up on HTML/CSS rendering that has a Figma-like interface. Framer and Plasmic are sort of like this except made the mistake of wrapping everything in React code with tons of unnecessary abstractions that make the HTML/CSS output really messy. I like the attitude relate.app (now Rainbow) has, but I don't see Figma being the final design tool, particularly when working with developers.

rosywoozlechan 4y ago
> CSS is the language of design, yet for some reason every design tool completely ignores it. Maybe for web development, but people use Figma for mobile app designs too and those do not for the most part use CSS as the language for design.
- The5thElephant 4y ago
  But CSS would still get you better prototypes that imitate native designs than anything Figma can provide. All the top requested features for Figma are CSS-like features even coming from designers who don't know CSS. CSS has solved many of the most difficult layout and design problems, why reinvent the wheel? I work on native app designs and other non-product design work in Figma and having the features CSS would provide out of the box would save me literally dozens of hours a month.
  - Existenceblinks 4y ago
    Yeah, auto-layout (flex) was weird at first but more and more designers get used to it, it becomes a preferable foundation for layout. I think they will love CSS eventually, it's just the teaching/learning process that can get them there. At least currently Figma hype gets them `display: flex`.
4y ago