Figma: The product design team’s process
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Re: Figma: The product design team’s process
#2I'm not a designer and I don't work in a design team, so I don't have much to add to the article. However I worked together with Rasmus during the early years of Spotify. It's now almost 2021 and he is still - by far - the most productive (in the Hacker News sense) and unique person I've ever worked with.
It still boggles my mind that the same person can:
(1) one hand be that stereotypical designer with the scarfs and the small cups of coffee and the Leica cameras, designing user interfaces and logotypes and brands (Spotify logotype, Spotify green color), designing popular fonts for the Internet ( https://rsms.me/inter/ )
(2) on the other hand be a great low level engineer, creating programming languages, virtual machines ( https://github.com/rsms/sol ), text editors, stuff like GraphQL, etc
A one man army for sure.
Re: Figma: The product design team’s process
#3For anyone doing design work, even if adjacent, it's hard to impress upon how amazing Figma is as a tool. It excels not just as a design tool, but collaboration and prototyping as well.
Re: Figma: The product design team’s process
#4I'm not a designer and I don't work in a design team, so I don't have much to add to the article. However I worked together with Rasmus during the early years of Spotify. It's now almost 2021 and he is still - by far - the most productive (in the Hacker News sense) and unique person I've ever worked with. It still boggles my mind that the same person can: (1) one hand be that stereotypical designer with the scarfs an…
Think about who would actually take a designer’s problems seriously and solve them. It would be a designer that can also program, no one else is going to give a shit or even recognize what needs to be solved.
By sheer necessity, someone like this had to emerge.
Re: Figma: The product design team’s process
#5I wish I could work in a place like this. Here each designer is held hostage by an army of VPs, few of whom know anything about design, who oversee all decisions and can override any design at whim. Thus us engineers have to constantly deal with design changes, up to and even beyond shipping, which often make little sense to anyone much less our customers. The design team often has to go through multiple design reviews by various levels of these executives, leading to long process times where nothing can be delivered waiting on the schedules of the execs. Changes that could be made in code in a minutes might take weeks to deliver, but no delays in shipping are permitted, so often we guess and hope it's close to being right.
I hate reading about places that are sane.
Re: Figma: The product design team’s process
#6I'm not a designer and I don't work in a design team, so I don't have much to add to the article. However I worked together with Rasmus during the early years of Spotify. It's now almost 2021 and he is still - by far - the most productive (in the Hacker News sense) and unique person I've ever worked with. It still boggles my mind that the same person can: (1) one hand be that stereotypical designer with the scarfs an…
Think about who would actually take a designer’s problems seriously and solve them. It would be a designer that can also program, no one else is going to give a shit or even recognize what needs to be solved. By sheer necessity, someone like this had to emerge.
I know he is just one example, but his success does reinforce a hunch of mine.
I never quite understood why the typical tech company product organization is so obsessed with finding the perfect graphic designer, instead of the perfect engineer.
Stick with me for a sec, I feel like I’ll draw a lot of heat here.
Good designers absolutely do good design work, and that’s wonderful! It just hardly ever, or does not at all, translate to how the product is actually built. At worst it leads to implementations being ad-hoc literal translation of high fidelity screenshots (of the perfect design!) that becomes impossible to maintain.
You could say the designer and some group of engineers are supposed to work together to build a “design system” and, well it might work, if you have good leadership. Not-so-good leadership will at worst not let engineers do this because it’s “not delivering value to the user!”, and decent leadership will let this happen once but ongoing maintenance will never happen.
So. What was the point of hiring the designer again? Having worked with companies, they do try to hire this “engineer who designs” all the time, and they constantly say things like “I know they’re a unicorn but maybe we’ll get lucky” but I think they would be surprised what a group of seasoned engineers in their field would be able to do design wise. Most web content does the same thing the same way nowadays anyway, you’re actually better suited copying UX that people will be familiar with :p
Re: Figma: The product design team’s process
#7Figma balls
Re: Figma: The product design team’s process
#8I'm not a designer and I don't work in a design team, so I don't have much to add to the article. However I worked together with Rasmus during the early years of Spotify. It's now almost 2021 and he is still - by far - the most productive (in the Hacker News sense) and unique person I've ever worked with. It still boggles my mind that the same person can: (1) one hand be that stereotypical designer with the scarfs an…
I truly think if Leonardo da Vinci were alive today, he'd be doing stuff like this. It's the modern version of Mona Lisa, Vitruvian man, and ornithopters.
Re: Figma: The product design team’s process
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think about who would actually take a designer’s problems seriously and solve them. It would be a designer that can also program, no one else is going to give a shit or even recognize what needs to be solved. By sheer necessity, someone like this had to emerge.
I know he is just one example, but his success does reinforce a hunch of mine. I never quite understood why the typical tech company product organization is so obsessed with finding the perfect graphic designer, instead of the perfect engineer. Stick with me for a sec, I feel like I’ll draw a lot of heat here. Good designers absolutely do good design work, and that’s wonderful! It just hardly ever, or does not at all…
Depends what you're building. Some buildings call for an architect, and with others, an engineer is all the architect you'll need.
If you're a heads down no-nonsense engineer, you're not going to build Fallingwater.
Re: Figma: The product design team’s process
#10For anyone doing design work, even if adjacent, it's hard to impress upon how amazing Figma is as a tool. It excels not just as a design tool, but collaboration and prototyping as well.
Figma has saved us uncountable human-hours in the era of WFH/Covid. Being able to see and work on anybody else’s files, instantly and simultaneously without mucking about with file servers and merging changes from multiple editors is amazing and a massive force multiplier.