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As a designer who was a front end developer in previous roles, I am very excited about both Dev Mode and the addition of variables, expressions, and conditional logic.
Has anyone else worked with teams where their entire idea of "product" was to create 100s of designs in Figma, and then just hand them to developers? What started this mentality?
Yes, absolutely, and it's among the worst ways to develop software. Designers kept coming up with controls that required coding custom behavior not already provided by the toolkit, either by modifying and extending components or creating new ones from scratch. Designers blamed developers for causing "rework" when it was found that the design included things that didn't exist, and developers took the blame when it took longer to implement the mocks than designers had led project leadership to believe. The lead designer's solution was to more-or-less abandon the team's pretense of being agile and get everything completely frozen well in advance of any coding.
Also, the backend was horrific, as might be expected when leadership treated it as an afterthought. I got the impression that because the system was built to replace an existing front end, leadership believed that it was just matter of wiring the UI up to the services that already existed. Some very legacy services, think mainframe-era fronted by a thin SOAP-to-json layer. Yeah and some of the backend services that turned out to be required didn't even exist.
I'm glad I'm done with that consulting gig. It was not fun, it wasn't challenging, it was just a grind, and if it is complete and they are able to turn off the existing front end on schedule I'll be shocked, and I'd want to know what kind of dumpster fire they end up with.
Really looking forward to this progressing to automatic React component generation and onto bidirectional sync; prompting automatic pull requests on Figma changes for affected components. I find that there are few tasks in software development more uninteresting than converting Figma designs into React components. The day I no longer have to do that will be a great day indeed :)
I'm going to have to look into this because while that sounds like an incredible future, I don't see it. we have thousands of custom classes and dozens of material themes, can Figma work with that and then generate a component using our core custom styles?...
Companies like Bifrost (YC W22) are working on this problem and already automatically generate React components from Figma autolayout designs.
As a designer who was a front end developer in previous roles, I am very excited about both Dev Mode and the addition of variables, expressions, and conditional logic.
PM for variables here as well! Happy to answer any q's you have regarding variables and conditional logic!
I remember making very complex prototypes with choices represented as branching sequences of nearly identical frames, and thinking "if I could set a variable and just show or hide some layer based on that variable, my life would be so much easier", so I'm happy y'all added this. It must have been a ton of work to implement this by you and your team, so good on you for doing it.
I ran a design team, and many really struggled with Sketch -> Figma transition, and took a long time. I welcome many of the new features. It's great for designers who are more technically oriented, though enterable input fields would be nice. I do wonder how non-technical designers are going to feel. The learning curve is definitely going higher. I'm worried about the rather pricey per / seat cost. There are far more…
Right now I can let devs with free accounts view files with the inspect tab and leave comments. If it works like that it shouldnt increase costs.
I ran a design team, and many really struggled with Sketch -> Figma transition, and took a long time. I welcome many of the new features. It's great for designers who are more technically oriented, though enterable input fields would be nice. I do wonder how non-technical designers are going to feel. The learning curve is definitely going higher. I'm worried about the rather pricey per / seat cost. There are far more…
I doubt it's adobe flexing its muscle, afaik, the DOJ is still looking into the Adobe/Figma merger. Currently Figma and Adobe are operating independently.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right now I can let devs with free accounts view files with the inspect tab and leave comments. If it works like that it shouldnt increase costs.
It will require a license https://twitter.com/Chris_Smeder/status/1671566245190303744
That doesn't sound like a bad deal to me. They're not taking away anything from free mode.
I ran a design team, and many really struggled with Sketch -> Figma transition, and took a long time. I welcome many of the new features. It's great for designers who are more technically oriented, though enterable input fields would be nice. I do wonder how non-technical designers are going to feel. The learning curve is definitely going higher. I'm worried about the rather pricey per / seat cost. There are far more…
> I do wonder how non-technical designers are going to feel. The learning curve is definitely going higher. how would this impact them? just use figma as usual i would assume looking forward to giving this a spin, our design team tends to go the iterative artboard style with everything...so sussing out values can be a pain
Since designers share files, whether at the same time, or at later date, if you have someone on the team who is fully taking advantage of all the features, like the new variables, conditional logics, etc.., and you're not quite up to speed, you may not be able to do your job effectively or may mess up what others have done.
Understanding abstractions / reference / inheritance is a skill that developers take for granted. But for non-technical folks, it takes time. Many struggle for a very long time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How has the release of giant LLMs and other LLM-powered design apps influenced your product roadmap in the last couple of months?
They bought an AI design tool company today https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1671561341893742592