
Why Figma Wins - adriand
https://kwokchain.com/2020/06/19/why-figma-wins/
======
vosper
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.

~~~
corytheboyd
I've encountered this as well. I am a proponent of just using low fidelity
shapes for mocks instead of high fidelity renderings of what it should
actually look like.

If you put enough work into the design system, and implemented it well for use
in code, all you should NEED is a low fidelity shape telling you where to put
existing components, and how to string them together. Everyone already knows
what a modal looks like, behaves like, etc. they don't need it designed for
them every time it comes up. That just wastes everyone's time.

~~~
giovannibonetti
A few days ago I was searching for a cloud native, low fidelity mock up tool,
and liked [https://gomockingbird.com/](https://gomockingbird.com/)

I have no affiliation with them.

~~~
corytheboyd
I'll check it out, thanks for sharing! Looks promising from one one minute
scan.

In a similar vein (also have zero affiliation) I discovered
[https://whimsical.com](https://whimsical.com) today, which also has a few
other promising looking tools like flow diagrams, post-its etc.

------
satvikpendem
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/)

~~~
josefrichter
Framer doesn't spit out React code once you're done. Code used in prototyping
is hugely different and unusable in production. And Framer makers know this
and openly talk about this, they're _not_ trying to be a code generator.

~~~
andratwiro
Well, I've found it pretty useful to hand animation in js as-is for specific
patterns (as we actually handle the specific bezier curve animation, timings,
etc...)

------
kaelig
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
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.

------
hypewatch
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?

~~~
tenaciousDaniel
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?

~~~
HugoDaniel
sketch file is an open format[0]. figma will lock you in. there is no export
project feature in figma

[https://help.figma.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360038006274-Files-...](https://help.figma.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360038006274-Files-in-Figma#format)

that is why it is so easy to migrate into figma from sketch, and impossible to
migrate away from figma into anything else...

[0] [https://github.com/sketch-hq/sketch-file-
format](https://github.com/sketch-hq/sketch-file-format)

~~~
mekster
I hate to see another vendor lock in by file format like PSD to keep
competitors out.

It better be fixed before they become big enough not to care.

~~~
HugoDaniel
adobe, microsoft, et al. also faked the fix and incorrectly fixed it by
exporting into other formats in a broken way. locking in makes sense from a VC
point of view.

from my point of view the only way to guarantee is to use software that
provides open file formats and develops their features around those open
formats. inkscape and sketch seem to be doing this

~~~
mekster
That's not going to work. People will take features over unknown future
uncertainty. Users just have to realize the past mistakes of other companies
and pressure the developers to open the format.

------
Andrew_nenakhov
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.

------
hn_throwaway_99
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-
sys...](https://www.figma.com/blog/how-we-built-the-figma-plugin-system/). 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.

------
corytheboyd
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.

~~~
mrpigeonpants
> Designers are frustrated because the systems they built are ignored.

Designer here. My experience has been that Figma has done the opposite. It's
created a lot of consistency with shared component libraries and standardized
type / color styles. Also, the fact that engineers can jump into Figma and
inspect CSS has been immensely helpful.

In the design world, Figma is like the equivalent of getting a robust IDE with
syntax highlighting, code completion, compilation, and debugging. It's
replaced multiple tools and connected people in a way that's never been
possible.

~~~
corytheboyd
In your experience, do you know if engineers implement the shared component
libraries as such in the actual applications? This would be as opposed to
engineers directly implementing the end result of work in Figma (Sketch, etc.)
that utilizes said components. There is a big difference there, and I'm always
curious to have more data points about how this actually happens at other
organizations.

~~~
emptysea
Anecdote: at my current org the ideal we talk about is having a component
library designed in Figma by the Designers and implemented by the engineers.

In reality Design doesn't use components and most pages end up being composed
of a bunch of one-off components and we waste a ton of time.

As a side effect of this, the app design isn't consistent across pages because
we aren't sharing components.

~~~
gedy
Ditto, we have a quite a few designers and they mostly seem to struggle with
thinking in components. They use design system like a color guide, and we keep
reimplementing patterns on many pages.

------
mostlyjason
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.

~~~
wereHamster
> […] 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.

------
virgilp
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
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
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.

------
ryanSrich
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.

------
blululu
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.

------
finkin1
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
_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
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

------
staysaasy
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.

------
mratsim
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=PLxLdEZg8DR...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB8Yt2dqZbo&list=PLxLdEZg8DRwTIEzUpfaIcBqhsj09mLWHx&index=15)

\-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23585006](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23585006)

------
simonbarker87
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.

------
andybak
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
You must have thought it was just a figment of your imagination, eh?

------
m4rtink
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
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?

------
tonyoconnell
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.

------
sizzle
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.

~~~
open-source-ux
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.

------
mmcconnell1618
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=P...](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)

------
josefrichter
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..

------
kitsunesoba
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
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
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.

------
howon92
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.

------
FlashBlaze
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.

------
kyriakos
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
I share different screens and version them.

~~~
kyriakos
That leaves versioning on designers side which means designer is the only one
who can confirm the changes. This can lead to misunderstandings.

~~~
kyawzazaw
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?

------
627467
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.

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coderintherye
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.

~~~
josefrichter
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.

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mnkypete
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.

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uxcolumbo
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.

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hising
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
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.

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achow
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).

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luckydata
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.

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memexy
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.

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tambourine_man
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
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
Interesting, to me Figma is dog slow, feature poor… I can’t imagine why people
would use it.

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wdb
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.

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

~~~
bshimmin
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.

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butz
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
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.

------
fastball
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)

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nailer
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
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.

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

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paulsutter
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
Fun fact: Figma recently announced link/URL support

I totally agree and have been moving my spec work from Notion to Figma too!

~~~
imjared
At a high level, how are you spec'ing in Figma?

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federico3
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?

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

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ta17711771
What's the best stack/methods to take a properly designed Figma prototype into
a HTML5+CSS+maybe JS web app? (PWA)

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

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vvpan
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
That's because 99% of good designers are on Mac. That has never been a serious
problem.

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gcoguiec
Also Figma is working on Windows.

