Genuinely curious for those looking to design closer to code - doesnt Webflow fit the bill ?
Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
111–120 of 134 posts
Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
#112[dead]
Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Figma puts codegen on plugins and partners. These either generate generic html or, more commonly, platform specific code.
I’ve not checked recently, but can you export an entire project retaining all interactions and run it offline like you would with a HTML based prototype?
Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Came here to write the same. I used to teach at a UX grad program where students were required to learn both design and development. But doing both on the same project was almost always a mistake -- the designer has to deeply understand and advocate for the end-user's mental model while the developer has to deeply understand the technical model and constraints. Attempting to do both often end up conflating them or co…
I think it takes really senior designer/developer that can do both solo. Those people exists but still it's better to be responsible only for just one because it's tiring and demanding.
The best people added the other skill over time after they have been already excellent in main one (in my experience mostly designers learned to code rarely it goes other way). But teaching it from start side by side as equal seems like it would slow down the process. That doesn't mean i wouldn't want designers to learn to code from the start but just keep it simple at first.
Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
#115Slightly off-topic, but I dislike this trend of "designers over-designing everything". This website is aesthetically pleasing, and has it's own unique style, but scrolling the home-page is laggy on my $4,000 Macbook (Chrome). I guess it's because it downloads 14MB of resources and tries to download more based on scroll position?
The website is made in framer (https://www.framer.com/) no code tool. If you look at Framer homepage it's also laggy to me on my macbook. It's worst on FF. I don't think its the scroll effects but many blurs/shadows - they seem to be less performant in FF than in Blink and since everybody test these in chrome... you got this outcome.
Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
#116As someone who develops email templates, you will never understand my pain. Figma creates a complete fantasy world for designers who do not understand that a pixel and color perfect design is going to be smashed to bits by the client. Also, I feel the rise of React is partially to blame. CSS frameworks were clunky and constraining - but they forced you into a lot of design constraints developed on years of best pract…
> Figma creates a complete fantasy world for designers who do not understand that a pixel and color perfect design is going to be smashed to bits by the client. Figma employee here. I'm curious if you see this as a mistake of the design tool itself, or if this is endemic to the constraints of html emails? Maybe phrased a better way, what would you like to see to help convey these constraints to designers?
Having a dedicated "Email designer" mode where it takes into account all the limitations of email rendering would be amazing. For example, you can't use a flexbox which designers take for granted, so they end up creating things that result in monstrously complicated s for emails.
How this would look/work in practice I truly have no idea, since you'd have to constrain them by removing some of those features, but then they don't really translate to regular markup/CSS 1:1 either.
Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
#117I 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…
True and valuable design is timeless and smooth. It requires a lot of work and collaboration, which cannot be done using Figma.
To this day, the hidden elephant in the room for professional SaaS apps is breakpoints and the experience between them, including when and why to transition.
Figma supports the hyperactive single designer, not the ambitious industry designer who works on something that has stood the test of time for many years.
Apple has changed its UI twice since 2007, while Figma designers do it almost every day. I think there is a connection.
Great product leads understand that great design doesn't mean firing up Figma every day, but paradoxically doing the opposite. Consistency over time is a human condition.
Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
#118I 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…
One day I will be part of my dream team where the UI designers and the FE developers are the same people. The amount of time my current team wastes on iterating on UI design, only to then do a second round of iteration on the actual developed product is insane. And then there are always massive inconsistencies in the designs, padding, margins, corner radii and so on are rarely consistent, and the developers ALWAYS point out these consistencies.
Just Do I Right the first time, and to that final round of UI refinement directly in the UI, as part of your development SDLC. It'll save so much time money.
Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
#119Major bias disclaimer: 1. I work for Figma 2. I work on AI at Figma, as well as on the design systems part of the product 3. Prior to Figma, I spent 7 years as a prototyper teaching designers how to go from idea->code without a design step in between I love designing in code, and I HIGHLY recommend you do so for smaller projects, but I disagree with some of the assumptions the author is making. The author states, "Th…
When you say that reusing patterns and components is very hard to do in code, do you mean this applies even when building a reference page in code, with your design system and all of your components?
Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
#120I've been working as a product designer for the last 10 years, but for a few years before that I was a software engineer. I've been interested in moving back towards the technical side of things. It seems that role, and what is described in this article, would often be called a "design engineer".
However, I don't quite understand what the role of a design engineer is. If a PM is the "what", design is the "how", and eng is the implementation. Where would a design engineer fall? I'm sure it is very much a spectrum, but I'd be interested in hearing from some folks who have filled this role.
Are you focused on the "how", but using code to achieve that? Are you focus on the "how" and it simply turns into the implementation? Are you focused on the implementation, but with the background and skills of a designer?