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So, I’m not familliar with whatever Figma’s Auto Layout is, but the complaint still feels somewhat wrongheaded. Design ≠ print design; if you’re designing for

So, I’m not familliar with whatever Figma’s Auto Layout is, but the complaint still feels somewhat wrongheaded. Design ≠ print design; if you’re designing for a reflowable medium, you’ll have to design to its constraints. A good prototyping tool should allow you to go outside the constraints for the moment, but for a web or mobile designer to dismiss those constraints as the engineer’s concern is about as appropriate as for a typographer to dismiss the constraints of type casting as the moldmaker’s: it won’t work.

nicoburns 1y ago
This is absolutely correct in this case. Figma Auto Layout is just a simplified version of Flexbox, and it's purpose is: 1. To adjust to size changes 2. To avoid having to manually position things in a row or column
d3vmax 1y ago
An innovative custom designer can use other tools or do manual animations / layout if they require.
_bent 1y ago
It doesn't play to the strengths of designers to have them think in terms of Flex layouts and it doesn't play to the strengths of developers to have them translate a design 100% specified to the layout-algorithm and hierarchy of components into code. Yet this is the workflow Figma encourages. What the author encourages is that the designers work more free-flowing with sketches and wireframes and that the developers take over earlier to bring that into a workable structure. And that the collaboration between designer and developer doesn't stop at an async hand-off, but that they finalize the design together -- in code. Some of the commenters here seem to be annoyed at designers that make "hard to implement designs" and therefore think they want designers to constrain everything with auto layout. But this doesn't address the cause of the issue, which is designs being made by designers in isolation, which are then being treated as gospel for developers to 100% match. This is the real problem. In my opinion the gravest issue with Figma encouraging this workflow is actually the feature gap. Figmas feature set is extremely underpowered in comparison to CSS. Figma doesn't even have grids. If designers are now building stuff only with the tools that Figma allows, all the cool and creative ideas that developers could bring in, because they are actually pretty easy to implement on their platform (the designer just doesn't know about it) will go away. I can only recommend you this talk by Matthias Ott: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Pq7VqNrtk4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Pq7VqNrtk4
- wx196 1y ago
  Figma actually now has grids: https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/31289469907863-Use-the-grid-auto-layout-flow https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/31289469907863-Use-...
  - _bent 1y ago
    those are layout grids and not grid layout (huge difference!)
    - wx196 1y ago
      You're right, I used a wrong link, fixed now. So Figma has both.
  - no_wizard 1y ago
    now to get designers to actually use these things. Figma has a bunch of good tooling, but getting designers to use it, and use it consistently, is the real problem. Designers exist in a realm seemingly, where outside pressure can't really be put on it from an organizational level to get them to uniformly adopt a set of standards they will always adhere to. Every company I have worked at, big, medium, small, seems to have this problem
  - brailsafe 1y ago
    To me, things like mobile-first responsive design and grid-based graphic design thinking are core components of designing for the web, so it's a bit wild to me that Figma, with such popularity, is just now getting grids, and as far as I'm aware no GUI tool has ever succeeded at building a capable visual responsive design tool close to on-par with just designing in the browser.
    - mananaysiempre 1y ago
      This does not seem that surprising to me. Browsers are by and large black boxes—less because of their architecture and more because of the sheer size of the code, although Firefox, for example, seems to have been moving towards a less open architecture for most of its history as well (deCOMtamination, death of XULRunner, Quantum, etc.). What you really want in a parametric web design tool is to crack open the layout engine and the CSS cascade and inheritance, at the very least. That’s a lot of work to target a demographic of designers and programmers who by now have largely decided to ignore CSS in favour of reinventing inline styles badly (Tailwind) and insert markup as necessary for the desired visual effect. (Is there a tool to do CSS in terms of React/etc. components, with proper cascading, custom pseudoclasses and pseudoelements and so on? I haven’t seen one.)
Oarch 1y ago
It's absolutely trivial to make any element ignore the auto-layout grid.

nicoburns 1y ago

This is absolutely correct in this case. Figma Auto Layout is just a simplified version of Flexbox, and it's purpose is: 1. To adjust to size changes 2. To avoid having to manually position things in a row or column

d3vmax 1y ago

An innovative custom designer can use other tools or do manual animations / layout if they require.

_bent 1y ago

It doesn't play to the strengths of designers to have them think in terms of Flex layouts and it doesn't play to the strengths of developers to have them translate a design 100% specified to the layout-algorithm and hierarchy of components into code. Yet this is the workflow Figma encourages. What the author encourages is that the designers work more free-flowing with sketches and wireframes and that the developers take over earlier to bring that into a workable structure. And that the collaboration between designer and developer doesn't stop at an async hand-off, but that they finalize the design together -- in code. Some of the commenters here seem to be annoyed at designers that make "hard to implement designs" and therefore think they want designers to constrain everything with auto layout. But this doesn't address the cause of the issue, which is designs being made by designers in isolation, which are then being treated as gospel for developers to 100% match. This is the real problem. In my opinion the gravest issue with Figma encouraging this workflow is actually the feature gap. Figmas feature set is extremely underpowered in comparison to CSS. Figma doesn't even have grids. If designers are now building stuff only with the tools that Figma allows, all the cool and creative ideas that developers could bring in, because they are actually pretty easy to implement on their platform (the designer just doesn't know about it) will go away. I can only recommend you this talk by Matthias Ott: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Pq7VqNrtk4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Pq7VqNrtk4

wx196 1y ago
Figma actually now has grids: https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/31289469907863-Use-the-grid-auto-layout-flow https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/31289469907863-Use-...
- _bent 1y ago
  those are layout grids and not grid layout (huge difference!)
  - wx196 1y ago
    You're right, I used a wrong link, fixed now. So Figma has both.
- no_wizard 1y ago
  now to get designers to actually use these things. Figma has a bunch of good tooling, but getting designers to use it, and use it consistently, is the real problem. Designers exist in a realm seemingly, where outside pressure can't really be put on it from an organizational level to get them to uniformly adopt a set of standards they will always adhere to. Every company I have worked at, big, medium, small, seems to have this problem
- brailsafe 1y ago
  To me, things like mobile-first responsive design and grid-based graphic design thinking are core components of designing for the web, so it's a bit wild to me that Figma, with such popularity, is just now getting grids, and as far as I'm aware no GUI tool has ever succeeded at building a capable visual responsive design tool close to on-par with just designing in the browser.
  - mananaysiempre 1y ago
    This does not seem that surprising to me. Browsers are by and large black boxes—less because of their architecture and more because of the sheer size of the code, although Firefox, for example, seems to have been moving towards a less open architecture for most of its history as well (deCOMtamination, death of XULRunner, Quantum, etc.). What you really want in a parametric web design tool is to crack open the layout engine and the CSS cascade and inheritance, at the very least. That’s a lot of work to target a demographic of designers and programmers who by now have largely decided to ignore CSS in favour of reinventing inline styles badly (Tailwind) and insert markup as necessary for the desired visual effect. (Is there a tool to do CSS in terms of React/etc. components, with proper cascading, custom pseudoclasses and pseudoelements and so on? I haven’t seen one.)

Oarch 1y ago

It's absolutely trivial to make any element ignore the auto-layout grid.