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Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

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Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#61

Post by willsmith72 »

legitster wrote: post #24

As 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…

That's just bad designing. Good designers use the Figma equivalent of flexboxes and develop responsible designs.

How is this react related? You could always write crappy css. A team creating non responsive react apps would not create responsive non-react apps

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#62

Post by omnimus »

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…

I am not sure if you are joking but there is whole set of techniques called fluid typography that does this (using css math functions mainly clamp) https://fluidtypography.com/ It's not a silver bullet and many people simply don't prefer it to having a few breakpoints (that includes me too).

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#64

Post by willsmith72 »

fantasybuilder wrote: post #56
jmull wrote: post #54

> But you know what AI will be great at? > ...Turning wireframes into frontend code (limited logic) > ...Wielding (and extrapolating) your design system > ...Creating beautiful visuals from screenshots and mood boards I don't think the argument works. It imagines AI will be able to do things that our current AI do not. Our current AI work in terms of what they've been trained on. Natural language to code works as wel…

Frankly, I am not even sure what "frontend code" means in this context. What stack? How is state managed? How is this code integrated into the larger production system? If by "frontend code" they mean fairly clean React code - that's just a small subset of what is actually needed for production.

Exactly. It's a dreamland where frontend styling is completely decoupled from logic and behaviour. Sounds good for a 2005 web designer.

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#65

Post by omnimus »

tomr75 wrote: post #47
tiffanyh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

doesn't tailwind do this?

Tailwind doesn't to anything special here. Its just css media queries.

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#66

Post by omnimus »

willsmith72 wrote: post #61
legitster wrote: post #24

As 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…

That's just bad designing. Good designers use the Figma equivalent of flexboxes and develop responsible designs. How is this react related? You could always write crappy css. A team creating non responsive react apps would not create responsive non-react apps

They said email templates. That means no flex/grid/typefaces etc etc. emails are painful caveman html

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#67

Post by brigadier132 »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #46
brigadier132 wrote: post #17

Earlier 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…

Worrying about wasted effort spent breathing some life into a mockup/prototype vs Worrying about creating some figmentary Figma imaginarium that wont translate well into the actual app I do think there is a risk, it's just not of throwaway code (the effort of that throwaway is vastly smaller than what this path replaces). The risk is more how & where the future could be constrained. If the prototype starts becoming t…

I don't code and design at the same time because I've noticed from experience that it's slower and gives worse results than designing first and then coding.

The wasted effort is one factor to it but another factor may be that I'm able to just focus on design and ux more and not think about implementation.

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#68

Post by max2 »

I can see authors point when it comes to smaller website or app. I work on enterprise products that are rather complex with large surface area. Despite being a pretty good coder (or at least used to be), I wouldn't attempt to iterate on changes directly in the code and link all the flows etc. It would take much longer and I'd lose ability to make rapid changes.

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#69

Post by garrickvanburen »

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…

My math is closer to 18 years.

At the time I was selling UX services, and the 'prototyping tools' of that generation were what drove me learn PHP, Ruby, and Javascript - for all the reasons you state. I was baffled by all the time and energy people spent becoming an expert in the prototyping tool rather than an expert in building for real. I declared these prototyping tools an expensive distraction and never looked back.

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#70

Post by whoisjuan »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #60
whoisjuan wrote: post #50

I'm a designer. I built brainglue.ai without Figma, a design system, or a UI library. I just went directly to code (react+tailwind) and let a style organically emerge. I'm not saying that I'm a unicorn and that my idea-to-code-to-design execution is flawless, but I certainly believe that in this situation, if I hadn't done it this way, I wouldn't have done it all. However, doing this would be wasteful or dumb in almo…

Nice design! Small suggestion, I would preload the contents of each tab and the images in the circle after the main content is loaded. There was a good two second lag loading the images here in Australia.

Ohh nice catch. Will do. Thanks
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