81–90 of 106 posts
I don't have much experience with Figma but looking at their prices I'd think that for someone who isn't doing a one off designs Claude Design would be much more expensive (especially if not on subscriptions) https://www.figma.com/pricing/
people who aren't designers and don't understand design should not be writing about Figma being dead - they don't even understand that design is NOT outputs.
Correct, design is really about understanding something and curating a solution for it. In tech, that just happens to mostly be distilled as mockups.
That being said, my team is increasingly not needing Figma itself for many features:
* The first pass is often a lovable prototype or some low-fidelity mockup. These are enough to get us all aligned on what's being built.
* Engineering takes a first pass. Gets a UI base in place.
* Designer (who can vibe code) or UI engineer comes in to put the high fidelity touches on things.
Basically, the product itself becomes the mockup.
Not sure Claude Design really competes with Figma. While it has a strong potential to let people iterate on using a design without the nuts and bolts of going back and forth with a designer, CD operates at the "leaf-node" level, where the output is generated. However, a lot of design has a deeper life-cycle than that. There's the collaboration, pitching, review, iteration, asset management, etc. In fact, the first st…
> However, a lot of design has a deeper life-cycle than that. There's the collaboration, pitching, review, iteration, asset management, etc. If corners can be cut, they will. All those steps would be flatened to something like CD and a couple of side tools. Companies did "collaboration, pitching, review, iteration" because they had a designer in the loop anyway for the actual final work. Now that they don't have to,…
The requirements are so unstable—the product team has few strong beliefs—that they change the next day. And then again every few days after. Hopefully, the changes are small enough that design isn't full resetting each time, but it's not rare to have big changes. The entire project gets swapped not infrequently. What eventually slows the changes is the engineering deadline and the fact that the developers need to start. But the slow drip of product requirements means whatever time budgeting went to design shrinks. And whatever time went to engineering is eaten into such that now the design needs to be something that can be built in half the original amount of dev time. Each day the designer takes at this point eats into that window and so it's dictated by what can get built.
I don't think that has to strictly be viewed like an entirely bad outcome, but for what it is and how it's accomplished, you could just cut the design part out. Besides, you're going to iterate later, right? Right?
> Anthropic themselves launched Claude Design which is a pretty direct competitor to Figma in many ways. While it's nowhere near functional and polished enough to replace Figma's core design product, I expect it will get significant traction outside of that The reaction that designers I know have given Claude Design couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for desi…
As someone who does both development and design, I agree. With some caveats. At this point, Claude now writes > 99% of my code. I wasn't an enthusiastic early adopter; it took me a while to be willing to let go of the reins. But in tandem with LLMs getting better, I also began to realize that what happens inside the code is very rarely important enough for me to care about. Like, I care that it's secure, and performa…
But as a person employing designers, I have already accepted that I will let go.
We did a marketing website redesign for our b2b saas product with a 3rd party design firm, we gave a lot of input, but the thing isn't perfect, at some point we had to call it done. It was still a significant improvement over what we previously had, but I am under no illusions that it is a masterpiece.
Now, coding tools do have some clear shortcomings for design atm, but how long they will be like that is not clear.
Used Claude Design to build the landing page for my side project (strimoza.com) over the weekend. Honestly impressive for a solo dev with no design background — got something shippable in a few hours. That said, I still ended up going back to tweak things manually. It's great for 80%, the last 20% still needs judgment. Not sure it kills Figma for teams, but for indie devs it's a game changer.
It’s pretty hard to read on a phone, and the prose, particularly in the bullet points, has that annoying LLM-y trait of focusing way too much on implementation details ("Bunny CDN"!) rather than telling me a single reason why I'd actually want to pay for your product.
Awful on desktop too, the weird squished font makes everything look like its in the wrong aspect ratio and the site is a weird combination of too noisy/busy combined with serious contrast problems between text and background colors.
Looking at this site I think human designers are going to be fine for a little while longer...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It still produces subpar code, with horrendous data access patterns, endless duplication of fucntionality etc Not really. 2024 called.
Just because you don't look at the code, doesn't mean it doesn't produce subpar code constantly . Opus 4.7, high effort. Literally 30 minutes ago. There's a `const UNMATCHED_MARKER = " "` that we want to remove from a file. Behold (the first version was a full on AST walk for absolutely no reason whatsoever, by the way): function restoreUnmatchedSelectors(cssPath) { const cssContent = readFileSync(cssPath, "utf-8");…
Maybe if you had a little more faith, you'd get better results :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> However, a lot of design has a deeper life-cycle than that. There's the collaboration, pitching, review, iteration, asset management, etc. If corners can be cut, they will. All those steps would be flatened to something like CD and a couple of side tools. Companies did "collaboration, pitching, review, iteration" because they had a designer in the loop anyway for the actual final work. Now that they don't have to,…
Agreed. I also think the collaboration, pitching, review bits have been heavily design theater for awhile. I'm not saying it was the designer carrying on the charade, but the product team generally. Those steps all really happen only for the final implementation to be a frankensteined fraction of what was discussed. I'm not saying anything remotely like we should be more respectful of the designer's effort, I'm sayin…
Absolutely. A chance for middle management and C-levels to bikeshed inconsequential bullshit and feel like they're doing something.
>That end result might be bad (perhaps it would help to be more respectful of the designer's efforts), but it's the same either way.
Can't be that worse than the slow to load, 50MB for a page, flat design full of wasted space shit redesigned every year or so to follow the new stupid trends that we're getting for the past 15 years
people who aren't designers and don't understand design should not be writing about Figma being dead - they don't even understand that design is NOT outputs.
These are a design communication tools, in the same way FrontPage and Dreamweaver back in the day - they enable a designer to communicate intent to create solutions to UX design problems in a way that can be understood by downstream production.
Using Figma doesn't immediately make something aesthetic or useful, its just a tool. Claude Design enables the same thing, it enables someone to communicate design intent, with a much lower bar.
These AI tools like Loveable just do more of the groundwork than Figma does
people who aren't designers and don't understand design should not be writing about Figma being dead - they don't even understand that design is NOT outputs.