12 ms·

(ex-Adobe, on a team highly related to an area where Figma out-executed XD, less knowledge about genAI stuff) > Adobe has probably captured back both mental an

by RickS 3y ago

(ex-Adobe, on a team highly related to an area where Figma out-executed XD, less knowledge about genAI stuff) > Adobe has probably captured back both mental and market share from Figma GenAI/Firefly's success is in a totally different domain to what Figma's doing. Figma's equivalent at Adobe is XD, which has never held a candle to Figma. The existential problem Adobe tried to buy their way out of still exists in the same form at, if anything, a greater severity. I was at Figma's config conf this year and they're finally shipping stuff I tried unsuccessfully to get from the XD team _years_ ago. > potentially, they might have been working on integrating into Adobe over the past year Highly, highly unlikely. I have no insider knowledge of Figma, but Adobe's a grown up company and _really_ does not fuck around on the legal stuff (which is part of the basis of Firefly's success – significantly cleaner legal provenance on their training data). Everyone I've spoken to at Adobe says they've been kept at a long arms length.

ska 3y ago
Curious: would you say that's reflective of Adobe's dev culture as a whole? I heard some similar comments coming out of a (claimed?) Lightroom developer about the motivations for that project...
- dharmab 3y ago
  Also ex-Adobe, worked directly with regulatory compliance in my role there. Adobe is a huge company with a diverse set of dev team cultures, but is a monoculture in regards to legal and regulatory compliance. They do not fuck around. (They're also very serious about security post-2013.)
  - lucubratory 3y ago
    What happened in 2013?
    - organsnyder 3y ago
      https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/adobe-source-code-and-customer-data-stolen-in-sustained-network-hack/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/adobe...
      - lucubratory 3y ago
        Thank you, I appreciate the link
doctorpangloss 3y ago
> (which is part of the basis of Firefly's success – significantly cleaner legal provenance on their training data). Yeah... I mean the pre-trained text encoder Firefly uses is filled with copyrighted, unlicensed-for-express-purpose training data. Firefly is successful in the same sense that DocuSign is, in that it is selling a holistic social experience, but I think maybe don't opine on "legal provenance on their training data" until you have seen the whole pipeline with your own eyes. Sophisticated people sort of know Adobe's claims are bullshit, but what exactly do you expect the community to do, speculate on the exactly zero evidence Adobe has shown of how any of their stuff works? Anyway, I am pretty sure Adobe is delighted they are not paying $20b for something that is worth way, way less. Like maybe $500m at most. Meanwhile the people using Figma at many companies are getting laid off. Etsy, Bytedance, Unity Spotify, Salesforce all made massive UX designer cuts. The real question is, is the thing people are using Figma for even worth $20b? No, no way. Figma users work in the Making Bugs department: they make new buggy things nobody asked for, that aren't lists or spreadsheets but should just be lists and spreadsheets, which makes everything worse. There is nowadays positive ROI to doing less Figmaing. In my opinion there has always been more ROI to doing less Figmaing, to straight up not having those people around and not gathering so many opinions on designing lists from so many stakeholders. That holistic experience is expensive in many ways, and while again you can be successful delivering that, it doesn't mean it makes sense. Just look at the Spotify app. It's a hot abject mess of absolute garbage UI. They have been diehard Figma users for years. They are the prime example of Figmafication ruining something extremely simple. It's fucking lists! Lists are not worth $20b.
- zombiwoof 3y ago
  nailed it
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  That is a pretty cynical take on what UX designers do. The PMs should be dealing with lists and spreadsheets, often they don’t and just tell the designer to just design the product in a mock. It isn’t the way things should go, just like how having programmers decide the UX while they are programming the UI leads to disaster.
- 3y ago
mattbrewsbytes 3y ago
Yeah usually the step kids aren't allowed to talk to each other until after the ceremony. In fact it might be illegal for the two companies to do anything regarding the merger until the transaction is concluded. That is when you'll see the HR, Marketing, Sales, and Legal teams have layoffs because typically post-merger those areas don't require duplicate teams.
krsdcbl 3y ago
As a graphics designer of almost 20 years i have to heavily agree. Firefly is nice for drafting and dabbling with stuff that once would've been served by stock sites, but aside picking a few demo images or making some abstract pattern backgrounds here and there, this has close to zero overlap with the UI/UX into development & design system management process Figma serves. It's almost like saying the Bing bot eats away at Laravels user base. As a personal aside: I'd like to commend the initial push you guys did with XD. While Figma was still out of my scope back then, and XD played a major role for me in transitioning away from oldschool Photoshop or Indesign mockup processes into a modern workflow that integrates with my dev team and focuses on component & design token centric thinking. Figma may have left XD thoroughly in the dust by now, and i honestly couldn't be happier that the merger won't happen, seeing how Adobe has been committed to absolutely dismantling the UX of Photoshop to the point of it only remaining installed on my workstation because Affinity Designer still lacks some core feature parity - but in its earlier days XD has been absolutely crucial to the development and modernization of my whole thinking and workflows!
- chefandy 3y ago
  Curious: what do you find missing in the affinity stuff? I see a bunch of people referring to it generally lacking 'stuff' but I'm curious about the sort of stuff it lacks. Maybe my use case won't be impacted much. I'm grandfathered in with the introductory CC pricing but there aren't too many threads left in the rope anchoring me to that. I rarely do print design anymore so InDesign isn't the huge sell it used to be, and photoshop is just annoying me more each day. If it weren't for illustrator, I'd probably be gone already, and inkscape just doesn't cut the mustard for that stuff... the type tools alone in illustrator keep me there. Audition suits me way better than audacity but I don't do anything remotely intensive enough with sound to warrant a hundreds-of-dollars a year subscription.
  - virtualritz 3y ago
    Alpha channel/mask handling still sucks in Affinity and keeps sucking.[1] For me this is already yet another app I paid for that is on the way to the famous 'enshittification'. It's been years since I saw it mentioned in the Affinity forums first. And still a workflow so essential hasn't been addressed by the devs. [1] https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/187070-alpha-channel-packing-editing-alpha-channel-as-regular-color-channel/ https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/187070-alp...
herdcall 3y ago
How is/was Figma so superior to XD exactly? I used to work with XD and briefly also used Figma, but never really liked it (seemed like a crude version of XD in a way), so never understood all the Figma rage. Genuine question, not challenging the view at all. The only pluses I saw for Figma over XD were that it was perhaps easier to collaborate and didn't need installation (because it is web based).
- 627467 3y ago
  In my view the fact that figma has been built for realtime collab just places it on totally different league. It's like office vs gdocs. It tool Microsoft years (a decade?) To catch-up and accept that most people collab online one way or the other
  - puppymaster 3y ago
    yep. Figma's 'workflow' has become an api in itself. In order to compete everyone has to match the flow
    - PeterCorless 3y ago
      +1 this. Website design has become an increasingly iterative, collaborative process inside companies. You can't just launch a new website and surprise your team. People need to annotate comments, and constant iteration is the name of the game. Design, solicit feedback, integrate, iterate, repeat. There's also a lot of work needed up-front on responsive design (as opposed to it being an also-ran or afterthought), and a move away from older typical WordPress-oriented static designs to modern dynamic JAMstack-oriented development methodologies.
      - exodust 3y ago
        > Design, solicit feedback, integrate, iterate, repeat. Except people in a typical company who might provide quality feedback on the new website, do not want to "browse Figma". They want an actual website to view - dev site or the actual new live site. > "You can't just launch a new website and surprise your team." Yes you can. Nothing beats launching a new site to motivate quality feedback. If you expect feedback to arrive soon after launch, you can use this to your advantage. If you like the sound of crickets, share a link to Figma and ask people for feedback. Designers and developers will respond, others like sales and non-technical staff often won't. Why? Because people prefer the security of their web browser's familiar reference point when assessing a website. As opposed to browsing an app that gives them a special window to a slippery canvas where an impression of the website is found.
berkes 3y ago
Anecdotally, but at least three studio's and designers I work with switched to Figma because "it became Adobe". They made the switch because Adobe gave it some sort of "stamp of approval". From two, I'm certain they'll never go back to XD and/or illustrator. One, I'm not too sure because all their onboarding, libraries and education is around "adobe products". So, at least from N=3, I dare say that the attempted merger only made the existential problem for Adobe worse.

by RickS 3y ago

ska 3y ago

Curious: would you say that's reflective of Adobe's dev culture as a whole? I heard some similar comments coming out of a (claimed?) Lightroom developer about the motivations for that project...

dharmab 3y ago
Also ex-Adobe, worked directly with regulatory compliance in my role there. Adobe is a huge company with a diverse set of dev team cultures, but is a monoculture in regards to legal and regulatory compliance. They do not fuck around. (They're also very serious about security post-2013.)
- lucubratory 3y ago
  What happened in 2013?
  - organsnyder 3y ago
    https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/adobe-source-code-and-customer-data-stolen-in-sustained-network-hack/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/adobe...
    - lucubratory 3y ago
      Thank you, I appreciate the link

doctorpangloss 3y ago

> (which is part of the basis of Firefly's success – significantly cleaner legal provenance on their training data). Yeah... I mean the pre-trained text encoder Firefly uses is filled with copyrighted, unlicensed-for-express-purpose training data. Firefly is successful in the same sense that DocuSign is, in that it is selling a holistic social experience, but I think maybe don't opine on "legal provenance on their training data" until you have seen the whole pipeline with your own eyes. Sophisticated people sort of know Adobe's claims are bullshit, but what exactly do you expect the community to do, speculate on the exactly zero evidence Adobe has shown of how any of their stuff works? Anyway, I am pretty sure Adobe is delighted they are not paying $20b for something that is worth way, way less. Like maybe $500m at most. Meanwhile the people using Figma at many companies are getting laid off. Etsy, Bytedance, Unity Spotify, Salesforce all made massive UX designer cuts. The real question is, is the thing people are using Figma for even worth $20b? No, no way. Figma users work in the Making Bugs department: they make new buggy things nobody asked for, that aren't lists or spreadsheets but should just be lists and spreadsheets, which makes everything worse. There is nowadays positive ROI to doing less Figmaing. In my opinion there has always been more ROI to doing less Figmaing, to straight up not having those people around and not gathering so many opinions on designing lists from so many stakeholders. That holistic experience is expensive in many ways, and while again you can be successful delivering that, it doesn't mean it makes sense. Just look at the Spotify app. It's a hot abject mess of absolute garbage UI. They have been diehard Figma users for years. They are the prime example of Figmafication ruining something extremely simple. It's fucking lists! Lists are not worth $20b.

zombiwoof 3y ago
nailed it
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
That is a pretty cynical take on what UX designers do. The PMs should be dealing with lists and spreadsheets, often they don’t and just tell the designer to just design the product in a mock. It isn’t the way things should go, just like how having programmers decide the UX while they are programming the UI leads to disaster.
3y ago

mattbrewsbytes 3y ago

Yeah usually the step kids aren't allowed to talk to each other until after the ceremony. In fact it might be illegal for the two companies to do anything regarding the merger until the transaction is concluded. That is when you'll see the HR, Marketing, Sales, and Legal teams have layoffs because typically post-merger those areas don't require duplicate teams.

krsdcbl 3y ago

As a graphics designer of almost 20 years i have to heavily agree. Firefly is nice for drafting and dabbling with stuff that once would've been served by stock sites, but aside picking a few demo images or making some abstract pattern backgrounds here and there, this has close to zero overlap with the UI/UX into development & design system management process Figma serves. It's almost like saying the Bing bot eats away at Laravels user base. As a personal aside: I'd like to commend the initial push you guys did with XD. While Figma was still out of my scope back then, and XD played a major role for me in transitioning away from oldschool Photoshop or Indesign mockup processes into a modern workflow that integrates with my dev team and focuses on component & design token centric thinking. Figma may have left XD thoroughly in the dust by now, and i honestly couldn't be happier that the merger won't happen, seeing how Adobe has been committed to absolutely dismantling the UX of Photoshop to the point of it only remaining installed on my workstation because Affinity Designer still lacks some core feature parity - but in its earlier days XD has been absolutely crucial to the development and modernization of my whole thinking and workflows!

chefandy 3y ago
Curious: what do you find missing in the affinity stuff? I see a bunch of people referring to it generally lacking 'stuff' but I'm curious about the sort of stuff it lacks. Maybe my use case won't be impacted much. I'm grandfathered in with the introductory CC pricing but there aren't too many threads left in the rope anchoring me to that. I rarely do print design anymore so InDesign isn't the huge sell it used to be, and photoshop is just annoying me more each day. If it weren't for illustrator, I'd probably be gone already, and inkscape just doesn't cut the mustard for that stuff... the type tools alone in illustrator keep me there. Audition suits me way better than audacity but I don't do anything remotely intensive enough with sound to warrant a hundreds-of-dollars a year subscription.
- virtualritz 3y ago
  Alpha channel/mask handling still sucks in Affinity and keeps sucking.[1] For me this is already yet another app I paid for that is on the way to the famous 'enshittification'. It's been years since I saw it mentioned in the Affinity forums first. And still a workflow so essential hasn't been addressed by the devs. [1] https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/187070-alpha-channel-packing-editing-alpha-channel-as-regular-color-channel/ https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/187070-alp...

herdcall 3y ago

How is/was Figma so superior to XD exactly? I used to work with XD and briefly also used Figma, but never really liked it (seemed like a crude version of XD in a way), so never understood all the Figma rage. Genuine question, not challenging the view at all. The only pluses I saw for Figma over XD were that it was perhaps easier to collaborate and didn't need installation (because it is web based).

627467 3y ago
In my view the fact that figma has been built for realtime collab just places it on totally different league. It's like office vs gdocs. It tool Microsoft years (a decade?) To catch-up and accept that most people collab online one way or the other
- puppymaster 3y ago
  yep. Figma's 'workflow' has become an api in itself. In order to compete everyone has to match the flow
  - PeterCorless 3y ago
    +1 this. Website design has become an increasingly iterative, collaborative process inside companies. You can't just launch a new website and surprise your team. People need to annotate comments, and constant iteration is the name of the game. Design, solicit feedback, integrate, iterate, repeat. There's also a lot of work needed up-front on responsive design (as opposed to it being an also-ran or afterthought), and a move away from older typical WordPress-oriented static designs to modern dynamic JAMstack-oriented development methodologies.
    - exodust 3y ago
      > Design, solicit feedback, integrate, iterate, repeat. Except people in a typical company who might provide quality feedback on the new website, do not want to "browse Figma". They want an actual website to view - dev site or the actual new live site. > "You can't just launch a new website and surprise your team." Yes you can. Nothing beats launching a new site to motivate quality feedback. If you expect feedback to arrive soon after launch, you can use this to your advantage. If you like the sound of crickets, share a link to Figma and ask people for feedback. Designers and developers will respond, others like sales and non-technical staff often won't. Why? Because people prefer the security of their web browser's familiar reference point when assessing a website. As opposed to browsing an app that gives them a special window to a slippery canvas where an impression of the website is found.

berkes 3y ago

Anecdotally, but at least three studio's and designers I work with switched to Figma because "it became Adobe". They made the switch because Adobe gave it some sort of "stamp of approval". From two, I'm certain they'll never go back to XD and/or illustrator. One, I'm not too sure because all their onboarding, libraries and education is around "adobe products". So, at least from N=3, I dare say that the attempted merger only made the existential problem for Adobe worse.