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Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

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Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#171

Post by maroonblazer »

nateroling wrote: post #170

The problem with these kind of pixel-perfect, inspectable design tools, is that there's no distinction between important details and unimportant details. For example, if our app uses a letter-spacing of 1.2 for all the body text, and your Figma design uses a letter-spacing of 1.25, is that important? Or is that a mistake? In something like Figma, being consistent is difficult for designers. But in code, being consist…

In my experience the designer and the developer need to be co-located, either physically or virtually. There's just too many questions that come up during implementation of a design that can't be expressed in the design doc (or it's inefficient to do so) and so the feedback/communication loop between these two needs to be fast and high-fidelity. I.e., the dev can't be offshore while the designer is onshore. I've tried it a number of times and it never worked.

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#172

Post by tharkun__ »

andsoitis wrote: post #165
tharkun__ wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to change things as design is still in flow is great, agreed. Once something is agreed upon the ability to change things without notice is really bad, especially if you're expected to follow the design as it has "final say". You go an implement something on Monday based on designs and show it to stakeholders on Tuesday. They compare with the figma board and flogg you because it looks nothing like it. Ugh!…

That sounds like an opportunity to improve on collaboration (i.e. people talking, notifying each other) as well as trust ("compare with the figma board and flogg you because it looks nothing like it") For instance, if something is agreed upon and a designer changes it afterwards, they could simply give you a heads up that they intend to do so with context so the two of you can discuss. People > process.

They could. They don't. It may not even be their fault. They don't know. They just change things. They live in their world. You tell them, they are sympathetic, apologize, vow to do better next time. They're in their world. They do it again.

The flogging still happens. Is that broken? Yes! Does it still happen in too many companies? Yes! Is there an easy fix where you "trust but verify"? Yes! (as in, sure I trust they will notify me next time, which even if they actually do may be too late. So we made the process "figma is the 'working theory' and what we actually build will sorta look like that". Not every stakeholder may understand that but we sure will tell them when the flogging is about to start. (I say flogging, but in reality it's a gradient of course and while in some companies it will resemble an actual flogging quite closely in others it's more like what you describe. Not all countries and companies are as chill as some others ;))

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#173

Post by dsmmcken »

jjcm wrote: post #61
karaterobot wrote: post #38

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!

Can I import variables from an existing css file? Can I export variables back?

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#174

Post by sethgoodluck »

nateroling wrote: post #170

The problem with these kind of pixel-perfect, inspectable design tools, is that there's no distinction between important details and unimportant details. For example, if our app uses a letter-spacing of 1.2 for all the body text, and your Figma design uses a letter-spacing of 1.25, is that important? Or is that a mistake? In something like Figma, being consistent is difficult for designers. But in code, being consist…

That's a problem with your communication between dev and design - not the tool

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#175

Post by esjeon »

bgribble wrote: post #103

As a developer, the "one big bulletin board" visual model that Figma promotes is one of the worst steps backwards in UX I have ever had to deal with. I am constantly zooming in and out and scrolling around trying to find anything. I hate it so much.

Yup right. I find myself zoned out while zooming in and out frantically and achieving nothing. It's often difficult to effectively navigate without guidance from the creator of the board. Figma is better as a collab tool than a documentation tool.

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#176

Post by andrewmcwatters »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #120
a1o wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think one can own a sketch license anymore can? I believe they switched for a subscription model.

You can, actually. See "Mac-only license" in their pricing [0]. Just as before, you get one year of updates. True, when Sketch started switching to a subscription model, they've buried the link to renew the license very deep so it was really hard to find, but I guess they've came back to their senses and it is now available right on the pricing page. [0]: https://www.sketch.com/pricing/

This must be very recent. I was looking at their marketing collateral in May, and it was simply no longer an option at all to buy a Mac-only license. You could only renew at the time.

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#177

Post by onlypositive »

supertofu wrote: post #153
tharkun__ wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've completely reneged on linking to figma in individual tasks. I take screenshots of the state of figma at the time we all agreed that "this is it" (or close enough to what we'll implement). Sure I'll leave a link in the epic to the figma "bulletin board" for that feature so that people can find it and look around. But that's it. We're also never gonna implement exactly what's shown in figma (or said screenshots) e…

And I thought it was just my design colleagues who did this :/

Next week on HackerNews:

Figma, considered harmful.

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#178

Post by nateroling »

sethgoodluck wrote: post #174
nateroling wrote: post #170

The problem with these kind of pixel-perfect, inspectable design tools, is that there's no distinction between important details and unimportant details. For example, if our app uses a letter-spacing of 1.2 for all the body text, and your Figma design uses a letter-spacing of 1.25, is that important? Or is that a mistake? In something like Figma, being consistent is difficult for designers. But in code, being consist…

That's a problem with your communication between dev and design - not the tool

Absolutely is is. But the tool itself is a medium for that communication. What is Figma for, if not communicating design decisions?

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#179

Post by rtpg »

RussianCow wrote: post #129
sublinear wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they mean 100x better than they'd be without it, not 100x better than a "1x developer" (whatever that means anyway).

It's still hard to believe that a note-taking trick makes you 10-100x better as a dev, for any definition of better.

Maybe not 10x but even just noting stuff means that picking up an older task that you had to shelve before could go from a 15 minute thing to a 30 second thing depending on what context you put down/how accessible it is.

Ultimately a lot of this stuff is commingled with comfort with tools and general ability to juggle things though, so hard to isolate the effects

Re: Making Figma better for developers with Dev Mode

#180

Post by jt_b »

emilsjolander wrote: post #17
yewenjie wrote: post #2

I hate when figma just always gives me CSS for absolute positioning. Is there any way around that?

Emil from Figma here! We have made a ton of improvements to the generated CSS code, and while we still sometimes provide absolute positioning we now separate it from the styling & flexbox code that you might actually want to pull into your codebase. We've also introduced an API extension point so third parties can now provide their own implementation of code snippers (code generation) in Figma's Dev Mode which Anima…

An option for TailwindCSS classes would be really clean too.
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