Comment by Lalabadie
7 days ago
I'm seeing lots of opinions from people in different roles who wish Figma would serve them, but I agree with the author.
Assuming Figma is meant to serve the design process, it tries to stretch far into implementation territory, but does it at the expense of the exploratory phase. Everything Figma adds either screams MAKE IT READY FOR DEV or GET ALL YOUR MANAGERS A FIGMA SEAT™. Those are not concerns for the early exploration and research stage. If Figma is one of the first tools I boot up in my design process, I'm immediately running into a conflict of priorities.
I put it in contrast with old-school Photoshop UI work (younger devs: yeah, it was pretty much the one option, plus the only thing taught at design schools). Photoshop was great at the exploratory phase. I would sketch ideas with my Wacom tablet and eventually translate hand-drawn wireframes to actual mockups. I still miss that workflow, it was great. The tradeoff then was that "final" documents were static, fixed dimensions documents that usually left technical issues to be discovered later during the dev stage.
Photoshop shaped the design process just as much as Figma does now. That's what the readily available tool does to someone using it regularly.
Unless you're building content-marketing or similar- you don't need a lot of the exploratory phase to be done freeform.
Trying to implement designs in a product where every single new design stretches or modifies the design system is mind bogglingly annoying as a developer, especially if you've got a small team trying to crank out new features. We don't need a tenth variation of a call to action, we don't need to use a new, tenth shade of blue or green for just this one place, we don't need a twentieth exception to the existing padding rules. If it is one size on desktop and another in mobile everywhere else, then those are how the sizes should change in this new feature too.
Once you've got a design language in place, leave it alone unless the change to the semantics is meaningful and consistent.
Having done the slice and dice of Photoshop files in years gone past, I'm very glad we have better tools for collaboration now.
These are complaints about the designer you are working with and the deliverables they're choosing to give you, are they not?
Figma isn't/shouldn't be the arbiter of what's possible in the project, that's a major point of the article.
My role as a designer is to explore options and _then_ narrow down to a sensible solution (diamond-shaped process, etc etc). My developer colleague is concerned by the second part of that process, and I should make sure to provide her with consistency and sensible use of exceptions. That doesn't change my responsibilities to the exploratory part, and I can't exclude it from my consideration when choosing and critiquing tools.
>These are complaints about the designer you are working with and the deliverables they're choosing to give you, are they not?
It is, to some degree, but the tools don't help any related party enforce consistency that will translate to the broader output of that work, that doesn't help matters very much.
In addition, designers themselves by and large don't seem to care enough about consistency like this. Engineers have design systems (ideally) that they pull from, but I'm still shocked in 2025 there is no good 1-1 communication of imposing the constraints of a design system in the designer <> engineer workflow.
Not to mention, for every designer I know that does adopt features of the tool that make this easier, like auto layout, there's a much greater number of designers that refuse to use them.
Seemingly, engineers hold themselves to a higher standard of consistency than designers do. I've seen this pattern too many times and its the only reasonable conclusion I've been able to draw. I was even hired to help streamline engineering and design work together and share as much as possible to get a corporate design system adopted, and I always had a hell of alot more resistance and argument with the design side of that equation on this.
edit: after seeing someone from Figma comment, I feel its unlikely it will ever have any of these types of features, which is a shame
Agreed 100%. This op-ed on a site called design systems is ironic.
The purpose of design systems is for visual consistency. If someone needs to freehand some ideas, bust out a blank sheet of paper or Illustrator, but when designing a new page for a app, we want all that baggage of existing components and layouts.
Exploratory design isn't for crafting padding overwrites and call to action tweaks...
It's for thinking from first principles about the problems users face, and how to shape the products we create to best help those users overcome their problems. This means reconsidering faulty assumptions about the nature of the problem users face & the shape of the product that best solves that problem.
I hate this shift of the role of design in software towards trivial aesthetic fixations.
Design should be a shared discipline that orients product development towards greater value for users, but as of late it's mostly a trendy & low value extension of marketing.
Visual design, interactive design and information architecture are all lumped together under UX, but there's little call for going back to first principles when you have an established design system.
When you do, you end up with prototypes that are disconnected from what exists, and don't look good when you actually start using the existing visual design system. That's where all the one-off tweaks start coming in.
Unless the business is willing to pay for research into a holistic change to the semantics of the existing design system, Figma is perfectly suitable for the majority of design work once a cohesive design language has been put together.
Figma has neglected its core audience - the designers.
Instead, it is trying to be all things to everyone, except it's serving no on well at this point.
And it all started with FigJam. Still a half-baked product trying to take piece of pie from Miro.
Then they released Dev Mode to extract more revenue. Now Figma Sites to compete against web build/hosting sites.
So many half baked products, it's frustrating. They're abusing their monopolistic position in the market.
there will be a time where they'll have to pull a Google and retire products that never worked out.