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?
Ya but you're probably taking certain things for granted that the author is not. The author thinks Figma really is amazing because it enables what they called "loop stacking" in the article. For programmers this is no big deal, programmers work with dynamic workflows and loops all the time. So if you're a programmer then I can see why you'd think it's overhyped but for most people it really is an amazing tool because it's an improvement over what they're used to.
I'm not a designer so I don't know how good it is and I only skimmed the article but the high level concepts in the article around managing design workflows make sense, e.g.
> Figma solved this problem. Designs in Figma are not just stored in the cloud; they are edited in the cloud, too. This means that Figma users are always working on the same design. With Dropbox, this isn’t true. The files may be stored in the cloud, but the editing happens locally—imagine the difference between sharing Word files in Dropbox vs. editing in Google Docs.
It sounds like Figma reduces friction in the collaboration process by clever use of cloud based and browser coordination. It's not innovative but it's a good application of existing technology to the design space.
Yeah I’m a programmer, so I think you could be right. I’d like to work with our designer using figma and get her thoughts / opinions to get a better understanding.
Also, because I’m a programmer, I’ve lived through many tech hype cycles (with mostly open source and developer tools). So over time I’ve become sensitive to this kind of rhetoric. That’s why my initial reaction was skepticism.
> It sounds like Figma reduces friction in the collaboration process by clever use of cloud based and browser coordination. It's not innovative but it's a good application of existing technology to the design space.
Out of curiosity, what do you consider innovative?
Good question. Do you have a definition we can work with? I tend to focus on theoretical innovations like mathematical theories so my definition is often at odds with what most people think is innovative.
Often innovation is in the eye of the beholder, for a clerk that's been manually entering data for years it might be innovative that it can be replaced with digitalization but for most researchers that's just "implementation" of existing tech.
I don't hold opinions on what the word should mean, just curious to find all the different meanings of it
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?
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
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.
"design online" is the key but not so much that the software runs in the browser, more that it allows for a different workflow.
Multiple people can be working on the same thing at the same time and anyone can view the in progress work. This changes the traditional file based workflow where designers pass a file back and forth if they want to keep the work together - often working in a separate file then "merging" the work into a master file one at a time.
Because all the files are online it's possible to see who is working on what including at the very moment. Its really easy for me to get a sense of what other designers are working on and whats been updated recently.
A huge bonus beyond designer collaboration is the way Figma breaks the previous separation of working file and final export. Non-designers can check in on an in-progress file at any time without needing a designer to export some static version of it. This allows designers to work on related things in the same file but each "thing" can be in at various stages of completion without having a negative impact on delivering final work. This is also great for transparency.
At a high level, that's about it, and it is huge. Sketch is macOS only. Hell, this page comes up when you google "sketch for <not macos>": https://www.figma.com/sketch-alternative/
I recently came across a Windows-only app called Lunacy which offers Sketch file import and editing for Windows users (I haven't tried the app).
The published Sketch file specification [1] is what allows Figma and Adobe XD (and Lunacy) to import Sketch files. Ironically, neither Figma or Adobe XD publish their file formats.
I think where Figma is pulling ahead of Sketch (in terms of usage behaviour) is that it is being used by more than just designers. In fact, Figma is beginning to encroach (possibly unintentionally) on digital whiteboard tools like Miro and Mural.
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.
Definitely, I'm not affiliated to Sketch but there are a few things on the article that are outdated. Through Sketch Cloud you can actually handle commenting, clickable prototypes and assets for the front-end team (avoiding using Zeplin and Invision). The plugin ecosystem is really strong on Sketch as well, and they are also rolling out collaborative editing this year.
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?