I keep thinking of the anime figure line Figma whenever someone says Figma :V
Why Figma Wins
21–30 of 191 posts
Re: Why Figma Wins
#22Figma 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.
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.
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
Re: Why Figma Wins
#23Figma 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 tw…
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.)
Re: Why Figma Wins
#24Not 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 al…
This is an interesting opinion. Can you share how would you design a proper structure so the above is not the case?
Re: Why Figma Wins
#25Our 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.
Re: Why Figma Wins
#26Our 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 license…
I love Whimsical. It's just so damn smooth and reliable.
All that being said, I think wanting one tool to serve not just designers but also product teams is probably too high of an expectation. We don't blame developer tooling if designers have a hard time making small updates to demonstrate design concepts. They're different domains, so different tooling is expected.
Re: Why Figma Wins
#27Figma 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?
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?
Re: Why Figma Wins
#28Not 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 al…
> 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.
Re: Why Figma Wins
#29Figma 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 tw…
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 leave…
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.
Re: Why Figma Wins
#30Our 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 license…
If Product is editing designs, you have bigger problems than money. And there might be some causality there.