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When Figma starts designing us

designsystems.international

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Re: When Figma starts designing us

#71

Post by iamcalledrob »

As someone who's worked in this field and seen it evolve for 20 years, this article really captures how I feel too about how tools shape your mindset and what you create.

The tool you have at hand has a huge impact on how you think. "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" and all that.

Nothing shuts down a feeling of exploration and creativity more than loading up a Figma file made up of components assembled with auto-layout. Sometimes you just want to play, rules be damned. That's when the magic happens.

This is not a dig at Figma. It just happens to be that Figma has become huge, and so the opinion its UI has about what you should be designing has a huge impact on the industry.

Re: When Figma starts designing us

#72

Post by quacked »

radley wrote: post #42
quacked wrote: post #14

I deeply, deeply despise the Figma-style design language that everything uses now, where there's barely any indication of what's clickable vs. what isn't and every screen is an endlessly-scrolling set of tiles and pills. No borders, no button depth, no hyperlinks, huge swaths of blank monochrome space, menus distributed randomly, and my least favorite software design element of all time--scroll bars that aren't visib…

That has nothing to do with Figma. That's all due to Jony-Ive-Deiter-Rams cargo-cult design thinking. I think liquid glass will remedy that specific issue (while introducing all new ones...)

Really? Every Figma mockup I've ever seen appears to be imitating that exact style. I don't think I've ever seen something different from any Figma product, even in their own advertisements. I thought it was a classic case of the tool/process constraining the design outputs, like those 5-over-1 designs that every new apartment building looks like.

Re: When Figma starts designing us

#73

Post by marcosdumay »

graypegg wrote: post #57
ranie93 wrote: post #56

Tangential: I have similar thoughts about Jira. The ticket-fication of organizational goals. At least it would be useful to pen any negative repercussions of this

I know it’s trite to just say “you aren’t holding it right!” when it comes to JIRA, but I do think there’s a sensible tool underneath layers of self-inflicted pain. (Self = Atlassian and its users) User stories, when they’re actually a real problem a real user would need solved, are fine. If you start there, and figuring out how to solve that problem is open to anyone on the team, and you keep the complexity to a min…

> User stories, when they’re actually a real problem a real user would need solved, are fine.

Some times. Other times they are detrimental, you need an algebra of composable operations up-front and any abstraction you put on the process of designing those will make people design a broken UX.

User stories are useful mostly for "flux-based" applications where the user has little freedom.

Re: When Figma starts designing us

#74

Post by ThePatientTiger »

danielvaughn wrote: post #33
miiiiiike wrote: post #10

No, 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 t…

I’m actively working on an alternative right now. It’s a tool for designing in the browser, using HTML and CSS. Everything is parametric by design, including tokens. Eventually I’ll have a working end-to-end prototype together, but not yet unfortunately.

That would be awesome, Looking forward to it.

Re: When Figma starts designing us

#76

Post by n3storm »

asoneth wrote: post #16
sumeruchat wrote: post #5

Engineers here will disagree of course but the job of the designer is to dream and your job is to build it

> the designer is to dream and your job is to build it You may be thinking of an artist. A designer's job is to understand and solve user problems. (FYI this is coming from a designer, not an engineer.)

It should be as you say, but is not happening. I've found many artists using Divi and Elementor producing shit with premade crap blocks.

Re: When Figma starts designing us

#77

Post by graypegg »

marcosdumay wrote: post #73
graypegg wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it’s trite to just say “you aren’t holding it right!” when it comes to JIRA, but I do think there’s a sensible tool underneath layers of self-inflicted pain. (Self = Atlassian and its users) User stories, when they’re actually a real problem a real user would need solved, are fine. If you start there, and figuring out how to solve that problem is open to anyone on the team, and you keep the complexity to a min…

> User stories, when they’re actually a real problem a real user would need solved, are fine. Some times. Other times they are detrimental, you need an algebra of composable operations up-front and any abstraction you put on the process of designing those will make people design a broken UX. User stories are useful mostly for "flux-based" applications where the user has little freedom.

> User stories are useful mostly for "flux-based" applications where the user has little freedom.

I'd say basically only useful for those sorts of applications! If you're going by user stories, there should only really be 1 way of solving any 1 issue, and users should get rail-roaded into it. There's always a solution to problems you've closed user stories for, but that's it. Anything outside those is unconsidered and might not even have a "hackable" solution since you're building everything up organically rather than as a designed system.

Great for start ups (saved time and money building the impactful flows, your product only needs to do a few things) but awful for enterprises (users have no freedom to warp your product to their needs, your product needs some predictable structure/rules they can build on... those composable operations you're mentioning.)

Re: When Figma starts designing us

#79

Post by bornfreddy »

PaulHoule wrote: post #25
miiiiiike wrote: post #10

No, 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 t…

Yep. Back in the 1990s there was a huge influx of people into web design who knew how to design for print at a "retail" level (design an ad or a poster) as opposed to a "wholesale" level (create a design system for a magazine) and as a dev I would frequently receive a PSD from a designer and figure out how to abuse the primitive HTML was had then to make something that looked like that. Today Figma has replaced PSD b…

This! It is bad enough that most designers think they are UX experts too (few of them are), but trying to micromanage devs so that every screen would be "pixel perfect" really takes the cake. Especially when the provided designs (that should be followed religiously) are missing core functionality and the whole flows. Just give me the guidelines please, and please please be consistent with them!

Well, I'm sure they have their own set of gripes about the developers too. ;-)

Re: When Figma starts designing us

#80

Post by no_wizard »

The5thElephant wrote: post #51
miiiiiike wrote: post #10

No, 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 t…

Exactly this. Thank you. We need a Blender-like design tool specifically for product design. Using HTML/CSS for rendering so it covers most web needs and that usually more than encompasses native app-layout emulation. Open source, technical, and not expected to be picked up in a day or fully understood top-to-bottom by everyone. The reason Figma is putting us into a design box is because it doesn't have all the CSS f…

as much as folks hate electron, I think if Figma was electron, it would at least have the entire chromium web engine to work with
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