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Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

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Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#31

Post by grumple »

Figma is for people to share and collaborate between team members. Especially between designers and devs, but devs at my company use it directly as well. You get something picture perfect that others can comment on or tweak. You can update it easily. Try out different colors or images or icons rapidly. You then also have visual documentation that can be sent to business people or partners.

If it’s just you, you don’t strictly need it. Personally though, I find it really useful precise because I’m not a great designer. I can fiddle around with sizes and layouts in figma until I get it the way I want it, then I turn that into code. I could jump straight from scribble to code, but having that middle step where I can exercise the idea without screwing with components or css feels nice.

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#32

Post by ridd_design »

ctward wrote: post #9

my 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.

it's a good push back. I do think this assumes some (small) design language to extrapolate. But that's also something that will become borderline free in an AI world so I think it's a safe assumption.

What's more interesting that doesn't exist yet is the ability to create more compelling visual languages/systems based on inspiration screenshots. That's a big unlock IMO. Everything right now is very generic.

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#33

Post by mvellandi »

I find Figma useful for quick ideation on small projects to see potential constraints and challenge assumptions. The lower-fi, the better. I only do mobile-design to focus on essentials, use grayscale colors to not be distracted, and don't make a mobile global navigation. If it was a larger project though, I'd definitely consider sketching as the speed is so much faster. And then jump into code.

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#34

Post by d3vmax »

tazu wrote: post #25

Slightly 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?

When is the last time you restarted your mac? I had this guy complain to me, everything is laggy and chrome is slow (memory leaks?). A simple restart fixed everything. Clear your chrome cache/etc. Disable all extensions you dont use and try again.

If it does not, try another browser.

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#35

Post by dexwiz »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #15
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.

Figma puts codegen on plugins and partners. These either generate generic html or, more commonly, platform specific code.

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#36

Post by reducesuffering »

tiffanyh wrote: post #26
lstamour wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want responsive page elements that change styling as you reflow the page, we have that now - container queries - https://developer.chrome.com/blog/css-ui-ecommerce-cq but it's still somewhat new, and nobody's existing design systems support them yet. People (myself included sometimes) still prefer using JavaScript for this stuff. It'll change over time, though. (Also I've been wishing for this for almost two d…

Thanks for sharing. I've just found that approach very clunky in practice, hence my comment about it snowballs into effectively having 3 different CSS (phone/tablet/desktop) and wrapped in media width queries. Though maybe I use it incorrectly. I'm always open to learning something new :)

I'm partial to the TailwindCSS approach where they're right next to each other like:

Hello World

I don't know how resizing defaults would work well for most cases instead of specifying what you want.

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#37

Post by earthnail »

tiffanyh wrote: post #16
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…

The closest I've come to that was using Tailwind.

    text=[1.2em] md:text=[1.0em] lg:text=[0.8em]

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#38

Post by tiffanyh »

lstamour wrote: post #30
tiffanyh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing. I've just found that approach very clunky in practice, hence my comment about it snowballs into effectively having 3 different CSS (phone/tablet/desktop) and wrapped in media width queries. Though maybe I use it incorrectly. I'm always open to learning something new :)

Well, I'm not sure of other syntaxes to make it simpler, but you could use a CSS variable to make it a little easier: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/var Especially if you re-use the same padding values for multiple parts of the page/site. Then you won't have to update values in 3 different places for each padding/font-size/whatever rule. Instead just set the variable for each @media width and then i…

You can't use variables in the media query itself.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40722882/css-native-vari...

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#39

Post by novok »

Figma could adapt by making something that actually produces code well too? Although it would add a lot of complexity and designers might not like having to make different versions for different platforms, like the 'android', 'ios', 'flutter', 'web', etc. There are tools like judo.app that make 1:1 native SwiftUI designs.

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#40

Post by paul7986 »

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…

Been a front-end designer since I started learning/my career (2007 lol) and sorta hate having to use Figma yet it's a lot like using Photoshop so it's not too bad. Yet I almost always just design/code in the browser using the "Inspect Element," tool (take my last design project, deconstruct it as needed and then copy and paste the code into an IDE; click refresh fairly often).
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