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Comment by danielvaughn

3 years ago

I'm excited to see alternatives to Figma, because using it is like an emotional rollercoaster for me. There are times when I'll open a massive project file with hundreds of frames, each with thousands of graphical nodes. And even then, I can zoom in and out with no friction at all, it's just buttery smooth. I've been a developer for over a decade, and I have no idea at all how they're able to pull that off. It's a technical marvel.

On the other hand, it's far from what I would want for a modern design tool. Managing tokens, or anything from the "design system" world, is an absolute headache. Compared to the efficiency of the dev tools I use, it feels like Figma (and every other design tool) is just light years behind.

Even when I use a tool that's built specifically for that purpose, like Supernova, I still feel pretty underwhelmed. I'm not sure exactly what I'm looking for, but I know that the current landscape doesn't cut it for me.

6 comments

danielvaughn

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ojkelly  3 years ago

In 2015 one of the founders wrote a really interesting post about how they did it [0].

> Pulling this off was really hard; we’ve basically ended up building a browser inside a browser.

[0] https://madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-design-...

  • natatana  3 years ago

    Which can make sense on the short term, but on the long term I'm sure browsers' SVG renderer will catch-up and use GPU rendering in the spirit of pathfinder, piet-gpu, etc.

    This is why I think it is wise for Penpot to use the native browser SVG renderer. They can spend their limited ressources on making a cool app while the browsers will inevitably improve their vector renderer on their own

sizzlordy  3 years ago

I'm exactly the same as you @danielvaughn.

I like Figma but everything in the design tools space feels like it light years behind dev tool. Particularly around anything to do with tokens.

Tokens are just variables. Ideally you should be able to reference one token with another token (ala variables) and NO DESIGN TOOL DOES THIS. It's maddening.

  • danielvaughn  3 years ago

    Right??? I just want to say "here are my colors, here are some spacing values, here are some font families". Then I want to be able to compose them into text styles and the like, etc etc. It feels like this shouldn't be a hard thing to build.