Comment by martinald
7 days ago
FWIW I think you're mostly on the right track. I have noticed the "implementation ability" of designs that have came over from designers since figma had autolayout massively improve.
Maybe there is an argument that it is stifling creativity (though I'm not entirely convinced of this), but it is saving SO MUCH eng time on implementing (or going back and forth) on 'non standard' elements that are often not very intentional nor have the designers realised the impact of them, especially when it comes to responsive design.
FWIW I think the next big improvement (from eng side) would be some sort of (simplified?) git style version control for figma. For big projects with many people collaborating this would be hugely helpful, but would actually be hugely useful even with small teams.
We often spend so much time as engs implementing designs to find out they were one revision behind or hadn't actually been signed off, especially working remotely.
> I think the next big improvement (from eng side) would be some sort of (simplified?) git style version control for figma
FWIW, we do have a simplified version of version control already - there's both version history as well as branching & merging in Figma. There are some restrictions with it however that make it less compatible with the way engineers think about versioning - namely you can't tie it to a version number, and you can't have multiple versions in use at once (ie you can't publish both a 2.0 and a 3.0 version of a library). We are looking at improving this, but as I think you caught on, there's a balance between making it equivalent to eng flows while also simple enough for more casual designers.
Ah this looks great and exactly what I had in mind - but only available on organization plans.
Right now I'm generally working with smaller teams/contractors for design stuff (I think this is very common btw that you have one designer and at most a couple of FE engineers actually working on this) - even in larger organisations I've collaborated with doing dev implementation for them I'm not sure many have upgraded to enterprise, but I get a somewhat limited view of Figma from the outside.
It would be awesome if you could enable this with a limited number of branches or something (even 2 would be a start - master/staging vibes) for pro plans. But I do understand that you need to push people to a higher tier - but I imagine it would really help adoption if I could push back to everyone saying please use branches. It's good to know though for future this exists!
As a designer, having the ability to lock certain pages from editing or component updates would get us really far imo. As it stands creating a canonical version requires versioning related components or breaking the component link to prevent inadvertent changes to the design. This could work per-frame as well – if it's 'ready for dev' then it is uneditable and doesn't receive component updates.