Comment by karaterobot
7 days ago
> A concrete example is Auto Layout... In practice, this locks the design in place and severely limits the possible expressions. You can’t drag things around freely or try odd combinations of layouts.
I'm a designer, I've used Figma since 2018, and this is incorrect. And not even incorrect in an "I feel differently, but I see what you mean" way. It's the opposite of correct. It's categorically wrong. Autolayout makes it easier to slap layouts together quickly, and change them quickly. The alternative is selecting the object and moving it with the arrows keys, which accomplishes the same thing but is slower, harder, less precise, and worse. It's not creatively empowering to manually align and space objects.
> “Ready for dev” implies that the creation is done and that the developer is merely there to execute the designer’s vision
Don't worry, no engineer I've ever worked with has shared your confusion.
"Ready for dev" is a work management trigger, like closing a ticket—or, more accurately, marking it ready for review. It doesn't mean anything except "this is ready for dev to look at and leave feedback". There is nothing about flagging a section as `ready for dev` that forces engineers to work on it as though it were canon law.
I don’t see how it could be categorically wrong. To me it’s categorically right: Auto Layout specifically is intended to restrict the possible layout options.
You trade off adding limitations for how much you can do in a design and move things around freely, and in return you gain more convenience and less work needed to organize designs. You can change designs around quickly… as long as they’re within the rather confined limitations of Auto Layout.
I think the fundamental disagreement is that one person sees creative empowerment as freedom from doing busywork, whereas another (including the author) sees it as freedom to experiment with a design without limits. Neither is inherently wrong, but the two are inherently in conflict.
> To me it’s categorically right: Auto Layout specifically is intended to restrict the possible layout options.
Except that you do not need to use Auto Layout if you don't want to mimic the flow of objects inside a flexbox container. You can just use a regular frame, and position things freely within it. Or, you can use an Auto Layout, but then absolutely position arbitrary elements inside that Auto Layout frame if you want. Auto Layout does not restrict a designer's layout options, it only adds to them.
> Don't worry, no engineer I've ever worked with has shared your confusion.
I have seen nontechnical product managers share this confusion to the strong detriment of projects.
I am not using Figma at all. Not a designer, and I know CSS, at least the part I am using and am not afraid of looking into it more when I need more. For example recently I wanted a grid layout, that has at maximum 2 columns and wraps to 1 column when not sufficient space for both columns is available, so I looked up how to do that.
"Ready for dev" -- If we expand that abbreviation, then it would be "ready for development" or "ready for developer", so the actual literal meaning to me seems to be: "Now you can show this to a developer so that they can _properly_ develop it." and not "Now put this onto your production website, you are done!"
Might be that many people get confused though.