Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
1–10 of 134 posts
Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
#2How shitty is Figma’s current “export as css/html/js” functionality? How many people do you think they have working on improving that? How many of the people Figma is paying to fool around with AI do you think are experimenting with building an AI stuffed full of css/html/js tokens, and other functionality for improving Figma’s ability to pick up working css/html/js, tweak it, and re-export it?
Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
#3my problem with Figma is that it became too technical and code-like. By the time I finish setting up layouts, paddings etc...I'm catching myself thinking - why didn't I just code it straight up, could have been as fast.
Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
#4This will come off as a humble brag, but I will say it anyway.
Right now, I am tasked with building a PoC for a new product my team wants to build by the end of the quarter. We have one big problem - we have no designer on staff. But we do have a design system with a library with re-usable react components and tailwind css, and those are things I am pretty good with. So I have full autonomy when it comes to turning product requirements into a live demo. I was able to accomplish quite a lot in a short period of time with no designer and just my own taste in design + ux. And product stakeholders were pretty satisfied, which means the outcome was productive.
So from my perspective, Figma is not only an awkward middle ground, but not even necessary for me.
Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
#5I feel seen!
I'm one of these codey designers. The madness that exists in modern design teams (I used to manage a team of 50!) is insane. There's a lot of time spent on "design systems" in Figma. Very generally Figma is not the website, and the effeciency additions of building tools there is a lost cause.
Modern CSS and your JS frontend of choice is a lot quicker and more powerful for component building and general design work. There's way too much to do with media break points and tokenization there. There's a misguided group of designers that are learning a lot of esoteric Figma features that don't translate into something users will ever touch.
10 and 15 years ago designers needed to learn the code part too. Somewhere along the way we put them in a corner and made learn these prototype tools.
Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
#6Figma is a cursed midpoint between useful and easy to make wireframes, and a functional working interface that can be refined later.
Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
#7Interesting, I really like balsamiq and still use it personally, despite work being a figma shop.
Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
#8Empowered with chatGPT (now claude), my partner as a designer pulls off extremely workable implementations of all different ideas without much need for sketching in a non-functional design tool.
When she does draft in design tools it’s usually more graphic in nature (branding etc).
Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
#9my push back on this is that unless you have a pretty robust visual design system the outputs are going to be incredibly unoriginal. Yes it will make solving UX problems faster but at the cost of visual differentiation. There is always going to be a place for high fidelity exploration for styling innovation and brand identity.
Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
#10I feel seen! I'm one of these codey designers. The madness that exists in modern design teams (I used to manage a team of 50!) is insane. There's a lot of time spent on "design systems" in Figma. Very generally Figma is not the website, and the effeciency additions of building tools there is a lost cause. Modern CSS and your JS frontend of choice is a lot quicker and more powerful for component building and general d…
Agreed that in most cases all this extra work and attention to detail is essentially wasted effort that never sees the light of day.
But it’s possible to extract value from it if you have a culture where designers build prototypes, and you can use those prototypes for user testing, feedback, demos and pitches, while the code is being built. But it’s rare that companies have this culture.