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Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

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Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#11

Post by ctward »

game_the0ry wrote: post #4

This 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 p…

I think in the future product designers will shift into two factions. Live code generation and design system development. Design systems will be the backbone of any quality AI interface generation system. How we build those design systems will be the interesting part. Will most people unify around material/carbon or will they invest in house teams to ensure their UX doesn't fall behind the competition?

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#13

Post by refulgentis »

There's this, which is more "will we fire all the designers?" (No), and there's the other massive problem: they were a nice, simple, web-native thing that was easily positioned to displace Photoshop and Sketch.app.

They never really successfully landed things that we used to call "major version bumps" and it's devolved into quite a mess. Not anywhere near Photoshop-level, but...it's a strange situation to me because you could build a successful business based on the premise of "that, but only 60% of it, with 5% of the headcount"

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#15

Post by uxcolumbo »

snide wrote: post #5

I 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…

I wouldn’t call Figma a prototype tool. It’s pretty bad at prototyping sophisticated interactions.

They are canvas based clickable mock-ups with fancy transitions and a few more things.

But it can’t generate / export to HTML which comes in handy when you need to use it offline.

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#16

Post by tiffanyh »

snide wrote: post #5

I 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…

> There's way too much to do with media break points

As someone who has been handwriting HTML/CSS for literally 25-years, I'm still shocked dealing with media break points isn't easier.

It easily snowballs into you having 3 different CSS (phone/tablet/desktop).

I wish there was something akin to 'light-dark' (where you can specific a different value conditional on the environment) but would be trigger based on window size.

e.g.

  font-size: window-size(1.2em, 1em, 0.8em)
Which would translate to, if the browser window is small (phone), use 1.2em ... if browser window is large (desktop), use 0.8em

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/color_value...

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#17

Post by brigadier132 »

game_the0ry wrote: post #4

This 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 p…

My experience is that you should never code and design at the same time for non-trivial products.

When I'm doing design work, there is a product spec already defined but it almost always changes once initial designs are completed and people have a better understanding of how it would work in practice.

If you were to code and design at the same time you would inevitably writing some logic as well and this often turns into wasted effort.

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#18

Post by refulgentis »

egypturnash wrote: post #2

How 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?

I don't know if these are supposed to be leading questions, or questions combined with assuming an answer to make a point, but tl;dr code export is good.

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#19

Post by GenerWork »

Figma is a tool and nothing more, despite some people to turn it into the end all be all of user experience. It will eventually be replaced with something, just as it replaced Sketch, and just like Sketch replaced Illustrator. I also noticed that the author barely touches on the people who make the interfaces (product designers). If the author gets their wish, businesses won't hesitate to axe their UX teams to save some costs.

Disclaimer: I'm a product designer who is very skeptical of the enthusiasm around AI as I can see a future where product will instead rely on AI instead of designers to create interfaces.

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#20

Post by tracker1 »

As a programmer, I find that much more than a wireframe guide is distracting. That said, I tend to have a good understanding of the UX rules for a given design style (often material) and the ui library/tools I'm using. Sometimes I might have questions about the interaction.

On the flip side, I've seen developers that just about need a functional example to work out anything and will still have issues with real functionality. So YMMV.

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