
Launch of Figma, a collaborative interface design tool - hellcow
https://medium.com/figma-design/design-meet-the-internet-4140774f2872#.x48eovhnq
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golergka
I'm going to review this from a very subjective standpoint. If you want, you
can just announce that I'm not the intended audience, that's OK. So, I'm a
lead developer of a mobile project (usually, a game), who wants to improve
collaboration with designers.

They work in a professional WYSIWYG design tool like Photoshop and Illustrator
(most know both). Then I take their designs and recreate them in the WYSIWYG
design tool — Unity3d UI engine, or iOS Storyboards, or this Android XML
thingy (I never actually worked with it, but from a couple of tutorials I got
a feeling that it's not that different). Re-creating these designs is work-
load problem as well as a communication one.

Now, this service allows me to solve this communication problem by asking
designers to learn this tool — which is new to them, which requires time, and
also isn't as powerful as Photoshop.

Or I can just ask the designers to learn the tool that WYSIWYG tool that I use
to actually create their designs — like Unity UI or iOS storyboards — and
solve both of these problems at once. Of course, they will also need to learn
the scary words like "Pull", "Commit" and "Push", but after long
experimentation I found out that designers are actually not brain-dead (as
many engineers erroneously think) and are capable of understanding the basic
VCS concepts.

This leaves me with a question: how is the first solution better than the
second?

And also: how soon will we finally understand that the 00s hipster/indie-kid
aesthetic is completely dead, and using it in a product video is not "cool"
anymore — and haven't been for the last 5 years? Seriously, "corporate suits
and elevator music" image would look much more fresh.

~~~
tptacek
The Photoshop-to-code problem is also well known in web design, where a third
solution, presumably applicable here as well, is the emergence of
transactional PSD-to-(whatever) services; designers make PSDs, and you pay $50
to have them converted to markup, which adds only marginally to the cost and
only a day or two to the turnaround time.

~~~
jasim
There have been a couple of tools that have attempted to automate this. A
quick google for "automatic PSD to HTML" will turn up many. But almost all of
them produce markup that is tightly dependent on the organization of the
layers in the source document. Also the elements are usually absolutely
positioned and the code in general needs a ton of work to get to a good shape.

There is no reason for this to be so. This can be automated - a developer
should be able to convert a design into well-written HTML and properly
factored CSS (using SASS mixins) in under an hour. This should make much
faster and cheaper iteration on the front-end possible.

We're building a tool to do this for Sketch -
[https://protoship.io](https://protoship.io). It is early days, but we've been
dog-fooding it to do conversion projects ourselves and I can't imagine going
back to manual HTML/CSS coding again.

~~~
wizzzzzy
Just out of curiosity, what kind of design do you expect a developer to be
able to convert into well written code in under an hour?

~~~
jasim
All sorts of web pages. The tool will create HTML and CSS, the elements will
use DOM flow and positioning, and grid columns if that information is
annotated through our UI. The developer has to give meaningful names through
our UI so that we can create CSS classes that follow BEM conventions.

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abalone
The main differentiator and focus of the post is "we're making this run in the
browser". But nowhere does it explain _why_ that's better for designers. You
don't need it to power collaboration features.

This echoes Asana and a lot of the "HTML native" product efforts. Which have
mostly failed as a technical approach and resulted in a return to platform
native apps.[1] What's different this time?

Meanwhile this prompts amazed reactions from folks who are technically
impressed with how far it pushes the browser. But that was the case with prior
HTML native efforts too. It distracts from a critique of the actual product
features.

I'd like to see a more head to head comparison with popular tools like Sketch.
Maybe the built in team collaboration is better than, say, a companion app
like Zeplin. But the implementation details don't really matter to customers.

[1] [https://blog.asana.com/2014/07/mobile-
plans/](https://blog.asana.com/2014/07/mobile-plans/)

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vladdanilov
The technology behind Figma is quite fascinating. From Twitter
([https://twitter.com/skuwamoto/status/672486788192055296](https://twitter.com/skuwamoto/status/672486788192055296)):

> We’re using C++ → asm.js for most of our app, so it would be tough. React-
> canvas, seems incredible, tho.

> The C++ → asm.js is via Emscripten. Everything else is done by our mad
> genius @evanwallace

Graphics engine is based on WebGL. Evan Wallace has done some incredible work.
Using C++ is a smart move, an emergency exit to a native app. Yet I think a
standalone app should be the priority.

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srameshc
Sorry, I thought it was launched. After I signed up, I got this "You’ve been
added to our waitlist. In order to ensure the best possible experience,
invites are being sent in phases. We'll let you know when we're ready for you.

See you soon!"

A little too early for the title, but product looks promising.

~~~
dfield
Thanks! I didn't submit, so no control over the title.

If you want me to bump you up on the waitlist, DM me on Twitter: I'm @zoink.

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salimmadjd
The product looks rather cool and congrats to the team, but I have some
concerns with this, _Today, after three years of silence and hard work, I
finally get to announce the launch of Sigma... we’ve raised to date ($18MM)_

1 - Building an online-based collaborative design tool is nothing that novel,
it's all about execution. Why keep it a secret. What do you gain by keeping it
stealth?

2 - $18MM to spend only to see if you got it wrong is a rather interesting
approach.

~~~
dfield
First, thanks for the congrats :)

1\. We didn't want to talk about ourselves before we had a product we believed
in. So we kept quietly building and we didn't announce until (a) the
performance was great, (b) we had the features designers needed to do their
work day-to-day and (c) early alpha customers were visibly excited.

2\. I think we might just have different points of view on this. Our approach
has been to build towards a vision rather than test a hypothesis as quickly as
possible.

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dfield
Hey all, I'm Dylan Field — author of the linked post / co-founder of Figma. If
you have any questions, let me know!

~~~
vanderZwan
Does "cross-platform" include Linux? I'd like to give this a try, but I'd
rather not boot back to Windows unless I have to.

~~~
dfield
In theory, yes. In practice, we haven't invested in testing Linux because
designers prefer other platforms.

~~~
vircheck
I thought developers were supposed to use the tool, too :)

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tbenst
I remember seeing an early alpha ~2 years ago that mainly consisted of pixel
transformations using sliders. Amazing to see how far Figma has come since
then, shrewdly moving from a browser implementation of a subset of Photoshop
features to a new collaborative experience that reduces friction on a workflow
already used by many in interface design.

Best of luck to Dylan, Evan & Team!

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she_moves_on
I think this is amazing technology and great work, but as a designer I worry
that collaborative design that this facilitates might actually lead to a worse
overall product. From my experience, design is better as a dictatorship of the
best designer. I'm sure many will disagree here.

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msutherl
A couple of years after everyone's dropped Photoshop for Sketch. It could be
the case that designers, like front-end developers, will have to get used to
the idea that all of their tooling will change every ~3 years.

Personally very excited about this and want to start using it immediately.

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yesimahuman
Looks cool. I wonder if it generates actual code/project stuff or is a pure
design tool like InVision/Sketch/etc.? I've always felt designers are well
served by existing tools and know how hard it is to get them to switch.

~~~
dfield
Thanks! We generate CSS styles and make it easy to export assets. We don't
generate layout code.

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xixixao
This looks great. It's tough to win over people from other tools, so it'd be
nice to see comparison with Sketch, say. Good luck, the future of Web is
bright with projects like this one.

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EC1
"And even better, it lives in the cloud".

Lost me here. I just want a solid desktop app that isn't a web wrapper or
lives in the browser. I can't stand web apps to be honest. It's almost there,
but it always feels like a cheap copy of what should be a proper desktop
application.

~~~
rossfishkind
I got access yesterday, and I have to say that it feels better than some
desktop apps. :)

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katabasis
How does this app compare to atomic.io [1], which just came out of beta and
appears targeted to a similar use case?

[1]: [https://atomic.io/](https://atomic.io/)

~~~
Hengjie
Atomic certainly didn't need $18MM to get to beta. They also use a canvas to
edit on.

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agumonkey
"since, we dropped our Photoshop license".. pretty telling.

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migueloller
How do you compare to [https://proto.io/](https://proto.io/)?

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williamle8300
MEH

