When Figma starts designing us
designsystems.international
When Figma starts designing us
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Re: When Figma starts designing us
#2As someone who has to actually build the crazy parallax-3d-not-a-grid layout the designer may have spend an hour on, I'm glad.
Maybe free flowing designs shouldn't take place in figma, it should only be for the final output. Even then the majority of apps being built everyday are simple crud apps and shouldn't be overdesigned. They are built for people to do their jobs.
Re: When Figma starts designing us
#3So, I’m not familliar with whatever Figma’s Auto Layout is, but the complaint still feels somewhat wrongheaded.
Design ≠ print design; if you’re designing for a reflowable medium, you’ll have to design to its constraints. A good prototyping tool should allow you to go outside the constraints for the moment, but for a web or mobile designer to dismiss those constraints as the engineer’s concern is about as appropriate as for a typographer to dismiss the constraints of type casting as the moldmaker’s: it won’t work.
Re: When Figma starts designing us
#4It sounds to me like what the effect that the author dislikes is actually more often than not a good thing.
Of course non-conventional designs have their time and place as well, but I'm not worried about designers being unable to pursue those just because Figma nudges them in the other direction.
Re: When Figma starts designing us
#5Engineers here will disagree of course but the job of the designer is to dream and your job is to build it
Re: When Figma starts designing us
#6Similar to software developers, there's a difference between meeting a user need with with established patterns and exploring novel ones.
The vast majority of consumer and enterprise products ought to be done with established design patterns. Figma is fine for this.
Whereas exploratory design is about coming up with novel patterns. Most of this work ends up being interesting but not particularly practical, and even when someone comes up with something great it's often not yet clear how and where it should be applied. In my experience only a few companies actually pull this off and the rest would be better off following existing conventions. Also in my experience, people who do exploratory design have a wider skillset and use a much broader and more flexible set of tools like pen and paper, physical prototypes, 3d modeling, computer graphics, video production, software development, etc.
The challenge has been that many designers are hired for the former but would prefer to do the latter.
Re: When Figma starts designing us
#7I think what the author is saying is that we’re losing the human touch when doing our initial design work. I’ve felt the same way the past years working in Figma and seeing new features being introduced. It’s a pitty the industry is slowly merging roles together to the point we’re losing the personality in design.
Re: When Figma starts designing us
#8So, I’m not familliar with whatever Figma’s Auto Layout is, but the complaint still feels somewhat wrongheaded. Design ≠ print design; if you’re designing for a reflowable medium, you’ll have to design to its constraints. A good prototyping tool should allow you to go outside the constraints for the moment, but for a web or mobile designer to dismiss those constraints as the engineer’s concern is about as appropriate…
This is absolutely correct in this case. Figma Auto Layout is just a simplified version of Flexbox, and it's purpose is:
1. To adjust to size changes
2. To avoid having to manually position things in a row or column
Re: When Figma starts designing us
#9Engineers here will disagree of course but the job of the designer is to dream and your job is to build it
Just as the best architects were often engineers, the same is true of design.
Re: When Figma starts designing us
#10No, here’s the problem: Figma doesn’t go far enough.
If you need a free form design tool to sketch, use one. There are hundreds of them.
I need to implement my design system inside of a design tool so I can prototype designs with multiple breakpoints, container queries, modes, and variants. Figma isn’t up to the job. Ever tried opening the variables tab on the Material 3 Figma file? Stutter, stutter, stutter, “this tab is unresponsive”. You can barely view a long variable list, forget editing one with multiple modes. And, I hope your variable names aren’t too long, because you’re not going to be able to see them in most parts of the UI.
The problem with Figma isn’t that it’s too engineer-y for designers, the problem is that it’s too designer-y for engineers. I spent a month implementing my design system in Figma before giving up and just doing it in code. With Figma you run into all of the downsides of building the design system in code (deeply nested items breaking when you move/change something) but you get none of the advantages.
Figma is a mound of half-baked (vaguely web-like) ideas, poorly implemented. So many times I’ve had things just stop working with no way to figure out why. 99% of the time it’s just a bug and you have to reload the app.
If there’s something better than Figma out there, please, let me know. For now I’m sketching in Figma and building my design system with extensions to Style Dictionary.