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Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

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Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#91

Post by legitster »

kwoff wrote: post #82
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…

Oh man, we have a certain email template at work, and the marketing team wanted to redesign that email; for some reason (broken communication, things out of the blue by company who bought ours, blabla), the designer thinks it's appropriate to just give us a Figma link that has no connection with the existing template or even any HTML. As a backend dev, I have no idea what to do with it. For an email, I'd expect somet…

This is a situation where you can save a lot of pain by bringing in outside help. It's not too hard if you have experience and know the limitations. But there are a LOT of gotchas. Even a simple poor choice of words can get the email caught in a spam filter.

If you have to white-knuckle it, I strongly recommend a service like Litmus or Email on Acid. They will also provide good templates to start from and good instructional content.

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#92

Post by manuelmoreale »

H1Supreme wrote: post #52
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…

> Modern CSS and your JS frontend of choice is a lot quicker and more powerful for component building and general design work. I'm a former designer turned programmer, and I couldn't agree more. I was recently tasked with doing some mockup images (no official designer on the team), and at the end, I realized that I could do it so much faster with code. Ironically, while I was putting the images together (I used Affin…

> I still think a sketchpad and a pen is the best way to generate ideas.

Couldn’t agree more. When I’m not working on a design that’s been passed to me by a designer I usually “design” on paper [0] and I still think it’s the fastest way to work through my ideas. I then jump from there straight to the browser.

But this is obviously an unsustainable workflow if you work in a team.

[0] https://manuelmoreale.com/how-to-make-a-blog

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#93

Post by manuelmoreale »

jjcm wrote: post #71
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…

> 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?

In my experience as a 13 years freelancer dev with a design background, the main issue I’ve experienced is that most designers don’t have a lick of dev knowledge and they don’t understand how easy or how complex is gonna be to code what they design. Or if it’s doable at all. Or how hard is gonna be to maintain a site designed the way they designed it. So it’s a matter of not having appropriate knowledge on the subject.

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#94

Post by cton »

tiffanyh wrote: post #38
lstamour wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You’ll be able to one day!

https://www.w3.org/TR/mediaqueries-5/#at-ruledef-custom-medi...

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#95

Post by jillesvangurp »

Figma is alright, if you use it right. The issue is that people are trying to create pixel perfect graphics designs in it, which is very fiddly and then has to be replicated in code.

So, you end up doing double work. An additional problem is that especially responsive applications with e.g. dark mode support, animations and css transitions, etc. can only be partially modeled in a pixel perfect way in Figma. You can do it but it's just very fiddly to do in Figma. And besides Figma's code export is useless for this; aligning design and implementation is mostly still manual work. And of course users only ever use the code version.

The proper way to use Figma is to focus less on the look and feel and instead use it to prototype UX flows. This is tedious and slow to prototype in code and this is where Figma can shine. Having a good component design system in Figma means that you just reuse the same components and don't have to waste brain cycles on their look and feel when designing a UX flow. It will roughly look like the real thing and you can click together a few new screens in minutes and compare a few alternatives. I work with good UX people and I see them use Figma effectively. Our designs aren't pixel perfect; generally. Though we do use it for e.g. icon design in svg form as well. But design and UX are two separate skills at this point with separate tool sets as well. Figma is alright for icon design but probably not the best tool.

This is of course not a new problem. People were designing web applications in Photoshop at the beginning of the century. UX was not a consideration and the people doing the design were graphics designers. Figma is arguably better but not necessarily aimed at graphics designers. It's a UX tool.

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#96

Post by nmfisher »

Interesting thread, because last week I was tinkering with an idea I had built out ( AI assistant for browser-based UI development), and I was worried that there was no point because Figma will inevitably do the same, and they'd dwarf the raw HTML/CSS/JS designers. Maybe not?

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#97

Post by ndneighbor »

One thing I kinda wished was the ability to code into Figma, much like how in Storybook I can have a resource of brand compliant components. For me, it's much easier to rectangle draw and even work with auto-layout, but one side of me just wants an environment where I can define my Figma components with code and just drag 'em around.

That type of middle ground to me, isn't awkward because usually before I want to implement, I am trying to increase the velocity of me trying to play around with ideas before doing raw implementation. ...but that's just me.

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#98

Post by [deleted] »

game_the0ry wrote: post #4

This will come off as a humble brag, but I will say it anyway. Right now, I am tasked with building a PoC for a new product my team wants to build by the end of the quarter. We have one big problem - we have no designer on staff. But we do have a design system with a library with re-usable react components and tailwind css, and those are things I am pretty good with. So I have full autonomy when it comes to turning p…

[deleted]

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#99

Post by silenced_trope »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #95

Figma is alright, if you use it right. The issue is that people are trying to create pixel perfect graphics designs in it, which is very fiddly and then has to be replicated in code. So, you end up doing double work. An additional problem is that especially responsive applications with e.g. dark mode support, animations and css transitions, etc. can only be partially modeled in a pixel perfect way in Figma. You can d…

No different than designers pre-Figma.

Many of the people in this thread are talking about designing web-sites. But I did work on mobile, specifically Android for the past decade.

It's amazing to me how many designers have always just designed for iOS, which just had a few form factors (1 or 2 iPhone sizes (more now) and 1 iPad size) -- I could never get them to design "responsive" like for Android's various form factors (device sizes + different resolutions).

Creating pixel-perfect designs that aren't flexible has always been the issue.

Re: Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

#100

Post by pjmlp »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #95

Figma is alright, if you use it right. The issue is that people are trying to create pixel perfect graphics designs in it, which is very fiddly and then has to be replicated in code. So, you end up doing double work. An additional problem is that especially responsive applications with e.g. dark mode support, animations and css transitions, etc. can only be partially modeled in a pixel perfect way in Figma. You can d…

Or worse, PowerPoint.

I was involved in a few projects back in the glory JSF days, where the customers expected pixel perfect Web UIs, like they had been doing for years with Win32 and Motif.

What a fun it was. /s

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