That’s the tool that is used everywhere nowadays, from prototypes, mockups, concept designs to specs from designers to developers.
I personally think that a key fact that is driving adoption, is that from the very beginning they used a web app instead of going native with a heavy desktop app.
Thanks to this, you can share designs with just a link and everyone can access it, users interact with a mockup, devs look up the styles and components.
…and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products.
Their secret sauce seems to be making a complex web app fast and snappy with webassembly and an ecosystem of plugins secured with quickjs sandboxes.
I notice HN comments often that say people want and appreciate native apps/UI, people don't like web apps, and people don't want files stored in the cloud. I think Figma proves these aren't things non-tech people care about when a web app is done well, similar for Google Docs.
The ease of collaboration in teams, and being able to just click a link on any platform to preview or start working on a design without installing anything is a killer feature.
The risks of vendor lock-in, losing control of your files, or price hiking sucks though, but convenience outweighs this for most. Coming from a dev background, I'd love open file formats and being able to pick where the files are stored though.
> …and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products.
I have to use both and switching to Adobe for stuff is painful and feels so archaic now because you lose the ability to have multiple people live edit/preview a document, you have to muck around with syncing files + installing, there's no free plan, and nobody on Chromebook or Linux can use it.
For example, it's so much easier, faster and with better results to just let a client edit copy directly on a design, rather than the clunky way of having them message you a list of edit suggestions that doesn't let them iterate properly. Or live pair editing with another designer. Really hoping Figma add CMYK/printing support too (would it really be that hard when they already support P3 and non-P3?).
For Sketch, it being Mac only feels very restrictive and not a good business choice for them. I personally use so few native Mac apps, a native UI isn't something that influences me and I'm not even clear on what differentiates them now. Native UIs can also be bad as well as good, I just want an app with a good UI. I often prefer a web app because it feels like it would be more sandboxed, especially for installing plugins (like Figma allows).
I have a browser extension that I sell, and I'm so glad I didn't go the native app route. It's higher friction than a web app for users to get started, but much lower friction than a native app, and it lets me easily target Linux, Window, Mac and Chromebook.
Design is a unique creative field when compared to most others, because with design you're not actually creating the final asset, it's more like you're creating a picture of the final asset that someone else needs to create.
E.g., take Blender, Adobe Premiere, Ableton Live, Photoshop, Illustrator, in all of those cases, what you export is the actual real asset (it's the movie, the drawing, the song, etc...).
It's not like that with design and it ends up pushing design apps away from native apps and towards web apps, because at some point someone, usually an engineer has to get in there and figure out all the details of how this actually needs to get built. So if the app only runs on a Mac that's annoying. But that's not an issue with say, Final Cut Pro, where the person editing the movie can just export the movie themselves, they don't need to involve someone that's maybe using a platform that Final Cut Pro doesn't run on.
It is a real failure of Adobe management that Adobe didn't make Figma but kept doing the native old klunky apps.
The failure started with the Adobe Acrobat being such a dog slow app and never being fixed. Adobe looked too much at market share and forgot to be a tech company, so every platform now has their own PDF reader instead of using Acrobat Reader.
Figma treated responsiveness and framerate as a key part of the experience, because of this approach even though it’s webtech it has much higher performance than Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, XD etc. so in a sense it embodies what native represents to people better than some literally native but poorly made software.
100% agree. People want, above all else, convenience. Whichever tool gets the job done with the least amount of friction for the end user will generally win. People don't want to mess around learning a program, they just want to get the idea that is in their head out into reality as quick as possible. The more friction there is, the more likely the idea is to die before it's realised.
It's like the old story about Steve Jobs. He asked a bunch of engineers to make him a printing application. So they scoured the printer manuals and made this app that implemented every feature possible and took it to Jobs. He instantly dismissed it as being way too complicated, went over to the whiteboard, drew a box with a button, and said something like "You drag the file you want to print on to the box and then click the print button."
> The risks of vendor lock-in, losing control of your files
As for Figma, being able to export SVG is lock in really a concern here? Many tools support .svg. So to me lock-in ain't even a concern for a tool like figma.
And you noted it well - I seem not to care if it is a web app if it works well: Figma, VSCode (Performance as a feature)
I believe it has more to do with having a great user experience than to do with whether it's a native app or a web app. Figma was convenient and way ahead of it's competitors. The thing that made it stand out was the collaborative features and the extension ecosystem. The features it didn't have were launched by highly motivated people as extensions. It made both collaboration and working fast extremely simple. Both collaboration and extensions are features that can easily be added to a native app. I love figma but I do miss the ability to be able to work offline.
> The risks of vendor lock-in, losing control of your files, or price hiking sucks though, but convenience outweighs this for most. Coming from a dev background, I'd love open file formats and being able to pick where the files are stored though.
Also you don't really have proper version control, and what little you have isn't integrated with the rest of your project.
> For Sketch, it being Mac only feels very restrictive and not a good business choice for them.
Also replying to this re Sketch, especially it being a business choice for them, Sketch is a Mac app through-and-through. That entire application would never in a million years have existed were it not for being Mac only. Sketch leveraged the Mac specific APIs created by Apple in the 2000s (e.g., Core Image and Core Graphics), this is exactly why Sketch was able to innovate on the UI-side (whereas Figma pretty much took Sketch's UI innovations wholesale, as pointed out several times in this comments section), because they didn't need the technical depth that Figma had, which had to re-implement all the low-level graphics APIs themselves in order to be cross-platform (Figma is not exactly a web-only app, it runs on at least Mac native as well, I don't have a source for this but I've heard it a few times [and I don't mean the separate app download Figma makes available, which is just a web wrapper, but there's a real Mac-native internal-only version of Sketch that's used for development]).
This is why for example Sketch was able to launch a compelling product with, I think two full-time employees(?) when it initially launched, that was competitive with Adobe products. This purely a product of the Apple ecosystem and specifically the climate in the 2000s when Apple was still pushing desktop-first technologies like high-quality image and vector libraries. Note also that Sketch didn't take funding until 2019 (and only then because Figma forced their hand), whereas Figma were VC-funded from effectively day one (Field was a Thiel fellow in 2012, first funding round in 2013).
There's two patterns here that were happening during the 2000s, one is bootstrapped Mac-first applications were often quite successful. Two, applications were using the AppKit to quickly iterate on interesting UI innovations, the fuzzy finder (LaunchBar, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaunchBar), the entire native-app-with-an-API-backend (Watson, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson), the extension-based editor (TextMate, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextMate), are some other examples of this.
> I notice HN comments often that say people want and appreciate native apps/UI, people don't like web apps, and people don't want files stored in the cloud. I think Figma proves these aren't things non-tech people care about when a web app is done well, similar for Google Docs.
I, for one, prefer web apps for almost everything. The less I have installed on my computer, the better. Exceptions are for really critical stuff like my text editor. Personally, if I was someone who actually used Figma, I'd prefer that to be a native app, too.
For almost everything else-- anything I only use lightly-- I want to keep that crap off of my machine.
I love Balsamiq and it was great to see it mentioned here. While the wireframes are intentionally simple looking, the ease of creating a mockup is unsurpassed IMHO.
Cant say I've ever experienced that, been using it several years on a range of hardware types (all mac based). The UI freezing would be something local, it's not literally running every action through a 3rd party server.
Figma was quick until a 12-18 months ago, it’s been getting progressively worse. It’s excruciatingly slow at times now. The version history feature takes forever to load. It’s a shame, at one point it was, in my opinion, the best execution of a web app, having avoided all of the issues that other web apps suffer from.
I don't have first-hand Figma experience, but Adobe products aren't free from lag and freezing issues either; there's a large hardware and software surface to support that comes with its own set of issues.
>I personally think that a key fact that is driving adoption, is that from the very beginning they used a web app instead of going native with a heavy desktop app.
In 2018 I signed up for Figma because of the Notion integration (you can embed Figma frames in Notion), and the generous free tier. Notion took off that year as well and I think both profited from another.
Flat design removed the technical barrier of entry for design, which made a design move away from a difficult-to-use app (a la the Adobe Creative Suite) and towards something like an office suite app (Figma is more similar to Google Slides than Adobe Photoshop). And office suite apps were already popular as web apps (e.g., Google Docs) before Figma.
> …and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products.
This wasn't possible before flat design, design was a hard technical skill requiring use of light sources, noise for texture, and carefully constructed gradients and shadows. Flat design is mainly just text on large swaths of color, which makes it much easier for someone to just jump in and edit a Figma file (e.g., this was not possible with the much more complicated Photoshop setups folks were using before to create designs like this https://www.anandtech.com/Show/Index/4485?cPage=3&all=False&...)
(Note on a long-enough timeline, it's not clear how this is all going to end up. E.g., if something like Apple's Liquid Design catches up that'll move the needle back in the other direction towards more complicated software to create complex lighting and refraction effects. Note that the problem with Figma isn't that it can't add these features, it's that adding them will make the software more complicated, which will reduce the value-add of it being a web app, because the more complicated the software is, the more difficult it is to use collaboratively. Simplicity is really what facilitates collaborative editing.)
I'm not sure I agree that flat design removed the technical barrier to entry. First off, not everything is flat. Second, and I think this is really important, the ability to deliver a beautiful design system and the ability to use a design system to create a nice UX are two fundamentally different skills. The artist that delivers the most beautiful gradient (which apparently using the gradient setting in photoshop is a Big Scary Skill™ that flat design solved) often is not an expert at how best to deliver iOS UI.
And your resident mobile designer who knows everything about iOS and Android probably isn't the best at rolling brand new design systems with or without really pretty gradients.
Because these are two different skills, I don't think the style of the design system really impacts the barrier of entry. Most UI designers aren't fiddling with the finer details like that. They're composing already defined "atoms" into the "molecules" of components and pages.
Well, with an established competitor like Sketch, you can laugh your way to the bank. SO many users pleaded their first born children to Sketch if they could have cross platform support, web-view support, real time collab, commenting system, cloud support, buit-in Developer handoff, nested components, auto-layouts - even just one of the above.
Sketch were nice and comfy and said NO to everything.
When you are coming into an established space, it must feel real good to have a competitor like that who gives away the full market to you kindly!
I honestly think the main thing driving their adoption is that you don't need to _learn_ anything to use it. For 90% of use-cases, the UI is as simple as the iOS photo editing app. It's a familiar experience from the moment you open the app.
Your most tech-savvy friends couldn't even reliably install the correct Adobe product, never mind be productive with it. Meanwhile, your grandma could crank out a deck in Figma Slides if she needed to.
Plus, their designs can scaffold easily to both web and native thanks to React framework. One day, you might be able to speak to figma AI, describe the UI, and the FigAI draws the flow/interface for you and then ships the bones of the app. Perhaps they will sprinkle in a backend too.
I recently tried Sketch for the first time, and was kind of blown away by how Figma looks identical to it. Did Figma exactly copy the Sketch ui or did they copy eachother and slowly grow closer?
Sketch was the market leader in ui design tools. Before that, it was photoshop. Only a step away from using something like blender or after efffects tbh. It was also mac only. And desktop only. It turns out design is one of those things that people like to see, and is not insrcrutable like code. So stakeholders asked to see your ui and you would send them... this file. They would then have to download the application, and deal with all the joys that come with different platforms, asking how to install the thing, security complians, licenses, etc.
Figma came in with a web app that made designing and sharing as easy as sending a link. They also had... let's say creatively viral approaches to licensing where anyone that edited a file automatically got added as a seat. But unlike those desktop applications, you could also leave notes - that's editing! So it wasn't just for designers the way photoshop or sketch was. Now instead of your team of 2-3 designers, it's like half the company. It's beautiful in a way that the latter group is way more numerous and uses <1% of the software features, yet gets charged just as much. Beautiful. And lucrative.
Anyways, they're similar because Figma made a web-based ui tool, and the base model for the workflow was already established by Sketch, so their fundamentals are very very similar.
> It's beautiful in a way that the latter group is way more numerous and uses <1% of the software features, yet gets charged just as much. Beautiful. And lucrative.
I know that I'm in a small/medium European company (~400 people total), generally very mindful of how we spend money but this is the exact billing model that would turn us away because too expensive for the features actually used.
- Design sharing was great and easy, yeah.
- Autolayout easily won over folks who didn't wanna learn Sketch
- Sketch was moving too slow at a critical time, leaving a lot of ground uncovered for Figma to jump in
That model reminds me of Gitlab. You need all these features so a seat has to be expensive. But you need a seat for even the smallest interaction with repos, whether you’re a dev or you just want to raise issues. Left a bad taste in the mouth.
It took this comment for me to realize Figma is not Sketch. I thought Sketch rebranded or got bought up by Figma. Never realized they are two different apps.
I've used Sketch since its early days and then after (who knows how many) years, reluctantly and angrily moved from Sketch to Figma. Sketch was the pioneer and Figma took a very long time to catch up with what I've considered important features, and of course Figma had the advantage of being cross-platform but that was a non-issue for me as Sketch introduced web-based previews for clients.
The reason why I ditched Sketch (even though I loved it) was because Sketch had quality control issues over time and they started messing with my work, even losing some of it (cloud saves). The frustration grew over a longer period of time until I lost all hope and just had to admit that it was a lost cause. I peeked at Sketch's changelogs for a year and saw only bugfixes and no features. I assumed it was dead; either way the chapter was closed, the entire company shifted to Figma.
P.S. which is not to say that Figma is in a good state now, or that I don't feel history repeating itself.
Sketch's biggest drawback was they only build a Mac app. The "mac app" space will get you consistent business but you will never grow your company to the scale of Figma or Adobe.
It's funny how the successes and failures of these two companies ultimately comes down to a single architectural decision that both took different paths on. Sketch's biggest drawback (even back in the 2010's when they were on top) was always that they didn't support Web, Windows or Linux and focused only on Mac's. Honestly it paved the way for Figma to just come up and eat their lunch.
The biggest mistake that Sketch made was not realizing there was a sea change sooner and shifting their focus to a web based app or even releasing Windows and Linux clients. Even now I went to their website and they only offer basic viewing tools on the web, if you want to create with Sketch you need a Mac and there's no way around that.
I don’t have the entire history of the two apps in front of me, but Sketch was definitely first, and from what I recall, Figma copied them, at least initially.
Macromedia Fireworks was the modern predecessor of these tools that ushered web graphics back in the dot com days. It was bought by Adobe, and shuttered around 2009.
One thing I thought would have been incredibly useful for me is to go from HTML -> Figma
There is a ton of focus on going from Figma to something you could presumably dump into react or html. But I found nothing in the reverse.
Realistically, for a lot of applications, there are more things in production than in Figma. It's just not practical to spec everything out when you're moving fast. But when you do want someone to look at it or tinker, it's a huge lift to migrate your current production to Figma. I wish they would use some AI for that. Just take a webpage, and build the Figma design docs. Doesn't even have to be perfect, just good enough to get help from designers
I want to be able to refactor designs, and not entirely from the command line. I do not see why Figma should not be able to do this. Coding comes later.
They’re adopting AI so that designers within figma can create. I don’t know whether this is good or bad (I don’t design) but if the tool everyone uses to mock things up gains coding abilities, we’re cooked.
You’ll be able to go from figma to production in weeks.
There's also code snippets so that developers can provide the HTML or React or whatever code to implement a component or set thereof. And that stuff feeds into an MCP server, so that in theory an AI / code assistant can implement a design in whichever framework you build in, but within some limits if you provide the right code.
Most of the offering is from current shareholders, not new shares issued. That’s non-dilutive I presume but also raises less funds for the company. Who has the privilege of selling at offer time? Employees I imagine are locked up and the stock will take a dump in 6 months.
No you absolutely can sell as employee. For that you have employees determine how many shares they would be willing to offer up for sale initially as part of the roadshow. The catch is that shares sold during the roadshow will then not have a price yet, because the price per share in the IPO is determined by the demand and what underwriters are willing to pay during roadshow negotiations. The lockup period starts after. Additionally, insiders can negotiate structured sales during the lockup (e.g. in the event the PPS gains significantly), but they again have to say how much they would be willing to sell without knowing the exact price.
Penpot (open source, web-based) has gained significant traction with a 4.0 release this year that added real-time collaboration and improved developer handoff features, while Inkscape and Krita continue to mature as desktop alternatives.
I randomly came across an app called Lunacy the other day, from stock vector and image marketplace Icons8.
I decided to give it a try. It’s pitched as a Figma alternative, but as essentially an expensive advertisement for Icons8 (the stock marketplace is built into the app), I didn’t have very high expectations.
Honestly, I was blown away. As a product designer who relies on a lot of advanced Figma functionality, I wouldn’t rely on it as my daily driver, but for a side project? I would choose it over Sketch. It covers all the basics of a modern UI design application, and even a few of the more recent additions to Figma like color variables. I’m surprised I haven’t seen more coverage of it.
I am not a designer but i used figma a lot for website projects. It is good but it took sooooooo long to load the files... even though I downloaded a desktop, still very slow.. anybody met with the same issue?
Stock is up 227% on base price. Figma wasn’t reliably profitable until very recently. Generated real cash in 2022, posted an inflated paper profit in 2023, took a one-time GAAP loss in 2024.
The IPO price started from $25 last week and ended at $33 due to increased demand. If it opens at the high range the company would be worth exactly what Adobe bid for it ($20B).
I remember the first viral blog posts about the drawing tools made for Figma. It was amazing to see so much love and attention to detail with the basic tools done so right. It reminded me more of FreeHand or Canvas or Xara than Adobe, which was a great thing. But those diamonds are now lost in the rough of a bad user interface and an app that has become progressively slower over the years. And we're still missing basic tools that the classic apps I mentioned had 35 years ago.
In the age of AI following Figma UI mock-ups has become a bottleneck; I spend more time on wrestling with styles than on actual functionality. Figma could have provided a way to integrate with LLMs, but the only thing they have is an MCP server which is behind the paid subscription and requires their desktop app...
the main driver of enshittificiation is that you need to grow profits. the problem is: your user adoption will have peaked at some point. you can then raise prices, which will also plateau. the last step is to enshittify your products to increase the margin by providing less for the same money and "reduce costs" (kick out the people/services that made the product good in the first place). the profit driven growth chasing will then kill off the product and the "capital" (shareholders) will move off to the next thing to gut and kill off for a bit of revenue.
it's sustainable if it doesn't need growth (and market beating growth at that). that would be a green flag.
thanks, that sounds like a good approximation of reality
it's a sad reality, I wish we've found the cure already, or perhaps nothing is broken and I just have to zoom out (for ex., smaller bow-and-arrow players now have a chance to take down the nerfed mastodon)
I'm sure plenty of people will make plenty of money. We don't work for them and we won't be able to buy at the IPO price, but the wheel keeps on turning.
You can submit a conditional offer to buy on IPO day with your broker (I do this with E*Trade). You will have to fill out a form with more questions than normal, and are not necessarily guaranteed an allotment at the IPO price.
Edit (1 hour later): I was allocated 2 shares @ $33. My request was for 100 shares, fwiw.
Figma is one of the worst evils of capitalism. Considered a leader in UIUX design software while its own UIUX is abysmal, full of amateur level mistakes, inconsistencies and bad patterns.
We have now a generation of designers that take Figma’s UX as an example to learn from and implement in their designs. To be a good designer today you have to learn to actively reject what Figma teaches you.
what else you could expect - Figma was born out of founder’s need to find a proof of concept test case for real-time collaboration JavaScript engine they created. They stumbled on this idea. Back then everyone used Sketch and wanted better prototyping and interaction design, and Figma appeared with its real time collaboration as major point which you used once just to try and never again. For occasional demos and in large organisations maybe it is useful, but with your average design team size is one person it’s not a problem to solve first.
And yet despite having this real time collaboration you still couldn’t collaboratively present your design. You have to shout all the time “and now, what screen you’re on, what do you see?, yes click on that button on the left”.
It shows how to this day, the UX is not at the table at Figma. They focus on opening offices all over the world and courting big clients. Because need growth, IPO.
Figma was first to employ an army of customer support “yes men” with sole task to answer in support forums and defuse frustrations this way, thus allowing Figma instead of fixing embarrassing bugs for years, to divert development resources to products nobody asked for, to fuel that growth.
Figma has became a product for investors rather than designers. And doing that it poisoned the design community, normalised bad UX and business practices.
About collaborative presentation, can't you click on the user icon (usually top right) for whoever's leading and figma will follow the screen to their cursor?
I distinctly remember that it's possible in Miro, and I'm pretty sure figma too. I think the problem you bring up has been pretty much solved.
I disagree. Designers are not dumb and understand tools and UX pretty well. There is a reason why it became so popular.
I would like to know about design tools that are so much better than Figma. I am trying to actively avoid it because it’s Thiel company but it is pretty hard.
Don't know what you're on about. I use Figma to design UI/UX all the time and have found great value in the RTC features. In fact like you say, I was using Sketch before (and tried Framer for a while), but Figma's collaborative features have been invaluable and so we use it for everything.
Jumping from "I don't need the features this popular software provides" to "Figma is one of the worst evils of capitalism" is a ridiculous leap.
The name of the company certainly does raise eyebrows. And from what I 'member from back in ye day, the Musk controversy actually helped them to raise users in the end because everyone and their dog was talking about Musk and him assuming getting hit by a "ligma" joke. That thing was all over the Internet.
The current product _must_ simply be a funding mechanism for whatever AI solution will ultimately define them. The idea that we’ll continue to have rigidly defined design mockups and specification seems relatively naive compared to generative UX defined by the user and their interaction preferences.
Imagine in that future world you describe, how immensely valuable a human artist will be: originality, wit, brilliance, their design will completely conquer any competitor generating the slop you dream of.
Agreed. I do still worry that this will upend the status quo. As with any ecosystem: slow changes are fine, but fast changes can be catastrophic.
I’ve worked with many people over the years who are good enough at their job, but will be replaced by AI (management’s choice, not mine). I’m probably one of those people as a mediocre engineer who prioritized family over career.
I have some backup plans, but it’s still tough and going to affect lots of people.
That will always be valuable, but I don’t think that’s what most designers are doing. If AI can copy flat design and Corporate Memphis style, it’ll compete just fine with the average designer.
We must live in different realities because most design has almost no creativity or originality at all. "Good design" means the website/design looks exactly the same as everything else.
We have the tools to do anything imaginable with film and video but the top box office films right now in the US are all completely derivative, non-creative human slop.
"Good design" is so trivial to do with generative AI.
We hardly live in 1910 Paris with all the cool people drinking absinthe in between cranking out all these artistic masterpieces.
As much as a skilled potter making fancy coffee cups conquers IKEA. Most people don't care about craftsmanship, and our economy nudges everyone towards convenient slop.
That’s the tool that is used everywhere nowadays, from prototypes, mockups, concept designs to specs from designers to developers.
I personally think that a key fact that is driving adoption, is that from the very beginning they used a web app instead of going native with a heavy desktop app.
Thanks to this, you can share designs with just a link and everyone can access it, users interact with a mockup, devs look up the styles and components.
…and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products.
Their secret sauce seems to be making a complex web app fast and snappy with webassembly and an ecosystem of plugins secured with quickjs sandboxes.
I notice HN comments often that say people want and appreciate native apps/UI, people don't like web apps, and people don't want files stored in the cloud. I think Figma proves these aren't things non-tech people care about when a web app is done well, similar for Google Docs.
The ease of collaboration in teams, and being able to just click a link on any platform to preview or start working on a design without installing anything is a killer feature.
The risks of vendor lock-in, losing control of your files, or price hiking sucks though, but convenience outweighs this for most. Coming from a dev background, I'd love open file formats and being able to pick where the files are stored though.
> …and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products.
I have to use both and switching to Adobe for stuff is painful and feels so archaic now because you lose the ability to have multiple people live edit/preview a document, you have to muck around with syncing files + installing, there's no free plan, and nobody on Chromebook or Linux can use it.
For example, it's so much easier, faster and with better results to just let a client edit copy directly on a design, rather than the clunky way of having them message you a list of edit suggestions that doesn't let them iterate properly. Or live pair editing with another designer. Really hoping Figma add CMYK/printing support too (would it really be that hard when they already support P3 and non-P3?).
For Sketch, it being Mac only feels very restrictive and not a good business choice for them. I personally use so few native Mac apps, a native UI isn't something that influences me and I'm not even clear on what differentiates them now. Native UIs can also be bad as well as good, I just want an app with a good UI. I often prefer a web app because it feels like it would be more sandboxed, especially for installing plugins (like Figma allows).
I have a browser extension that I sell, and I'm so glad I didn't go the native app route. It's higher friction than a web app for users to get started, but much lower friction than a native app, and it lets me easily target Linux, Window, Mac and Chromebook.
Design is a unique creative field when compared to most others, because with design you're not actually creating the final asset, it's more like you're creating a picture of the final asset that someone else needs to create.
E.g., take Blender, Adobe Premiere, Ableton Live, Photoshop, Illustrator, in all of those cases, what you export is the actual real asset (it's the movie, the drawing, the song, etc...).
It's not like that with design and it ends up pushing design apps away from native apps and towards web apps, because at some point someone, usually an engineer has to get in there and figure out all the details of how this actually needs to get built. So if the app only runs on a Mac that's annoying. But that's not an issue with say, Final Cut Pro, where the person editing the movie can just export the movie themselves, they don't need to involve someone that's maybe using a platform that Final Cut Pro doesn't run on.
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It is a real failure of Adobe management that Adobe didn't make Figma but kept doing the native old klunky apps.
The failure started with the Adobe Acrobat being such a dog slow app and never being fixed. Adobe looked too much at market share and forgot to be a tech company, so every platform now has their own PDF reader instead of using Acrobat Reader.
Figma treated responsiveness and framerate as a key part of the experience, because of this approach even though it’s webtech it has much higher performance than Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, XD etc. so in a sense it embodies what native represents to people better than some literally native but poorly made software.
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100% agree. People want, above all else, convenience. Whichever tool gets the job done with the least amount of friction for the end user will generally win. People don't want to mess around learning a program, they just want to get the idea that is in their head out into reality as quick as possible. The more friction there is, the more likely the idea is to die before it's realised.
It's like the old story about Steve Jobs. He asked a bunch of engineers to make him a printing application. So they scoured the printer manuals and made this app that implemented every feature possible and took it to Jobs. He instantly dismissed it as being way too complicated, went over to the whiteboard, drew a box with a button, and said something like "You drag the file you want to print on to the box and then click the print button."
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> The risks of vendor lock-in, losing control of your files
As for Figma, being able to export SVG is lock in really a concern here? Many tools support .svg. So to me lock-in ain't even a concern for a tool like figma.
And you noted it well - I seem not to care if it is a web app if it works well: Figma, VSCode (Performance as a feature)
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I believe it has more to do with having a great user experience than to do with whether it's a native app or a web app. Figma was convenient and way ahead of it's competitors. The thing that made it stand out was the collaborative features and the extension ecosystem. The features it didn't have were launched by highly motivated people as extensions. It made both collaboration and working fast extremely simple. Both collaboration and extensions are features that can easily be added to a native app. I love figma but I do miss the ability to be able to work offline.
> The risks of vendor lock-in, losing control of your files, or price hiking sucks though, but convenience outweighs this for most. Coming from a dev background, I'd love open file formats and being able to pick where the files are stored though.
Also you don't really have proper version control, and what little you have isn't integrated with the rest of your project.
> For Sketch, it being Mac only feels very restrictive and not a good business choice for them.
Also replying to this re Sketch, especially it being a business choice for them, Sketch is a Mac app through-and-through. That entire application would never in a million years have existed were it not for being Mac only. Sketch leveraged the Mac specific APIs created by Apple in the 2000s (e.g., Core Image and Core Graphics), this is exactly why Sketch was able to innovate on the UI-side (whereas Figma pretty much took Sketch's UI innovations wholesale, as pointed out several times in this comments section), because they didn't need the technical depth that Figma had, which had to re-implement all the low-level graphics APIs themselves in order to be cross-platform (Figma is not exactly a web-only app, it runs on at least Mac native as well, I don't have a source for this but I've heard it a few times [and I don't mean the separate app download Figma makes available, which is just a web wrapper, but there's a real Mac-native internal-only version of Sketch that's used for development]).
This is why for example Sketch was able to launch a compelling product with, I think two full-time employees(?) when it initially launched, that was competitive with Adobe products. This purely a product of the Apple ecosystem and specifically the climate in the 2000s when Apple was still pushing desktop-first technologies like high-quality image and vector libraries. Note also that Sketch didn't take funding until 2019 (and only then because Figma forced their hand), whereas Figma were VC-funded from effectively day one (Field was a Thiel fellow in 2012, first funding round in 2013).
There's two patterns here that were happening during the 2000s, one is bootstrapped Mac-first applications were often quite successful. Two, applications were using the AppKit to quickly iterate on interesting UI innovations, the fuzzy finder (LaunchBar, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaunchBar), the entire native-app-with-an-API-backend (Watson, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson), the extension-based editor (TextMate, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextMate), are some other examples of this.
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> I notice HN comments often that say people want and appreciate native apps/UI, people don't like web apps, and people don't want files stored in the cloud. I think Figma proves these aren't things non-tech people care about when a web app is done well, similar for Google Docs.
I, for one, prefer web apps for almost everything. The less I have installed on my computer, the better. Exceptions are for really critical stuff like my text editor. Personally, if I was someone who actually used Figma, I'd prefer that to be a native app, too.
For almost everything else-- anything I only use lightly-- I want to keep that crap off of my machine.
> I think Figma proves these aren't things non-tech people care about
Canva (which is a tool ACTUAL non-tech people care about) proved that years ago
Yes, Sketch's failure was to focus on being Mac only.
It may be than in US, and countries of similar income levels, all designers carry Apple gear around, however 70% of the world does not.
Before Figma, we were using a mix of InVision, Adobe XD or Balsamiq.
I love Balsamiq and it was great to see it mentioned here. While the wireframes are intentionally simple looking, the ease of creating a mockup is unsurpassed IMHO.
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Figma? Fast and snappy?
It runs impressively well for a web app, but I still get multi-second freezes all the time on high-end hardware.
Cant say I've ever experienced that, been using it several years on a range of hardware types (all mac based). The UI freezing would be something local, it's not literally running every action through a 3rd party server.
Figma was quick until a 12-18 months ago, it’s been getting progressively worse. It’s excruciatingly slow at times now. The version history feature takes forever to load. It’s a shame, at one point it was, in my opinion, the best execution of a web app, having avoided all of the issues that other web apps suffer from.
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I don't have first-hand Figma experience, but Adobe products aren't free from lag and freezing issues either; there's a large hardware and software surface to support that comes with its own set of issues.
Hey there, our Figma support team would love to help dig into what might be causing this. If you’re up for it, you can reach out to them directly by filling out this form: https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=...
I agree with you. Even with their app on Mac M2 Air, it keeps freezing for me.
I always thought one of the things that made Figma successful was that it was multiplayer from day one.
A lot of apps start as single player and then try and bolt the multiplayer experience on later.
But Figma was designed around collaboration.
I actually think this was more crucial than whether it was web or native.
And also it's soooo much smoother than native Adobe tools, even though it runs in the browser.
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>I personally think that a key fact that is driving adoption, is that from the very beginning they used a web app instead of going native with a heavy desktop app.
In 2018 I signed up for Figma because of the Notion integration (you can embed Figma frames in Notion), and the generous free tier. Notion took off that year as well and I think both profited from another.
Is notion still being developed? Seems to have stagnated and feels like there’s 0 investment now. It’s getting slow and buggy.
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Flat design removed the technical barrier of entry for design, which made a design move away from a difficult-to-use app (a la the Adobe Creative Suite) and towards something like an office suite app (Figma is more similar to Google Slides than Adobe Photoshop). And office suite apps were already popular as web apps (e.g., Google Docs) before Figma.
> …and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products.
This wasn't possible before flat design, design was a hard technical skill requiring use of light sources, noise for texture, and carefully constructed gradients and shadows. Flat design is mainly just text on large swaths of color, which makes it much easier for someone to just jump in and edit a Figma file (e.g., this was not possible with the much more complicated Photoshop setups folks were using before to create designs like this https://www.anandtech.com/Show/Index/4485?cPage=3&all=False&...)
(Note on a long-enough timeline, it's not clear how this is all going to end up. E.g., if something like Apple's Liquid Design catches up that'll move the needle back in the other direction towards more complicated software to create complex lighting and refraction effects. Note that the problem with Figma isn't that it can't add these features, it's that adding them will make the software more complicated, which will reduce the value-add of it being a web app, because the more complicated the software is, the more difficult it is to use collaboratively. Simplicity is really what facilitates collaborative editing.)
I'm not sure I agree that flat design removed the technical barrier to entry. First off, not everything is flat. Second, and I think this is really important, the ability to deliver a beautiful design system and the ability to use a design system to create a nice UX are two fundamentally different skills. The artist that delivers the most beautiful gradient (which apparently using the gradient setting in photoshop is a Big Scary Skill™ that flat design solved) often is not an expert at how best to deliver iOS UI.
And your resident mobile designer who knows everything about iOS and Android probably isn't the best at rolling brand new design systems with or without really pretty gradients.
Because these are two different skills, I don't think the style of the design system really impacts the barrier of entry. Most UI designers aren't fiddling with the finer details like that. They're composing already defined "atoms" into the "molecules" of components and pages.
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Well, with an established competitor like Sketch, you can laugh your way to the bank. SO many users pleaded their first born children to Sketch if they could have cross platform support, web-view support, real time collab, commenting system, cloud support, buit-in Developer handoff, nested components, auto-layouts - even just one of the above.
Sketch were nice and comfy and said NO to everything.
When you are coming into an established space, it must feel real good to have a competitor like that who gives away the full market to you kindly!
I honestly think the main thing driving their adoption is that you don't need to _learn_ anything to use it. For 90% of use-cases, the UI is as simple as the iOS photo editing app. It's a familiar experience from the moment you open the app.
Your most tech-savvy friends couldn't even reliably install the correct Adobe product, never mind be productive with it. Meanwhile, your grandma could crank out a deck in Figma Slides if she needed to.
From my limited use of figma, everything starts from a template. I think this is a core part of adoption.
accurate
Network effects create strong moats.
Just look at FB, GitHub, LinkedIn, etc…
If its used everywhere already, where is the grow going to come from?
Great analysis.
And this all only kind of reads like an ad.
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It’s a terrible analysis that ignores that LLMs destroy most of the value proposition of Figma, and this is a last chance to find a bigger bag holder.
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Plus, their designs can scaffold easily to both web and native thanks to React framework. One day, you might be able to speak to figma AI, describe the UI, and the FigAI draws the flow/interface for you and then ships the bones of the app. Perhaps they will sprinkle in a backend too.
Good readings:
https://madebyevan.com/figma/
https://madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-design-...
https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-... (old but interesting still)
I recently tried Sketch for the first time, and was kind of blown away by how Figma looks identical to it. Did Figma exactly copy the Sketch ui or did they copy eachother and slowly grow closer?
Sketch was the market leader in ui design tools. Before that, it was photoshop. Only a step away from using something like blender or after efffects tbh. It was also mac only. And desktop only. It turns out design is one of those things that people like to see, and is not insrcrutable like code. So stakeholders asked to see your ui and you would send them... this file. They would then have to download the application, and deal with all the joys that come with different platforms, asking how to install the thing, security complians, licenses, etc.
Figma came in with a web app that made designing and sharing as easy as sending a link. They also had... let's say creatively viral approaches to licensing where anyone that edited a file automatically got added as a seat. But unlike those desktop applications, you could also leave notes - that's editing! So it wasn't just for designers the way photoshop or sketch was. Now instead of your team of 2-3 designers, it's like half the company. It's beautiful in a way that the latter group is way more numerous and uses <1% of the software features, yet gets charged just as much. Beautiful. And lucrative.
Anyways, they're similar because Figma made a web-based ui tool, and the base model for the workflow was already established by Sketch, so their fundamentals are very very similar.
> Sketch was the market leader in ui design tools. Before that, it was photoshop
No before the current iteration there was Fireworks, then the smaller web apps for wireframe prototyping (Balsamiq, etc).
Professional Designers used inDesign for bigger portals or complex and vast UIs. Or AI for the prototypes.
Photoshop lacked good vector tools and comprehensive styling of corpus.
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> It's beautiful in a way that the latter group is way more numerous and uses <1% of the software features, yet gets charged just as much. Beautiful. And lucrative.
I know that I'm in a small/medium European company (~400 people total), generally very mindful of how we spend money but this is the exact billing model that would turn us away because too expensive for the features actually used.
Wouldn't say it's just that.
- Design sharing was great and easy, yeah. - Autolayout easily won over folks who didn't wanna learn Sketch - Sketch was moving too slow at a critical time, leaving a lot of ground uncovered for Figma to jump in
But most important:
It was free.
Sketch also had a cloud service for sharing designs and prototypes, and commenting on them.
You could also get a constraints plugin for Sketch. That’s built-in on Figma.
That model reminds me of Gitlab. You need all these features so a seat has to be expensive. But you need a seat for even the smallest interaction with repos, whether you’re a dev or you just want to raise issues. Left a bad taste in the mouth.
It took this comment for me to realize Figma is not Sketch. I thought Sketch rebranded or got bought up by Figma. Never realized they are two different apps.
I've used Sketch since its early days and then after (who knows how many) years, reluctantly and angrily moved from Sketch to Figma. Sketch was the pioneer and Figma took a very long time to catch up with what I've considered important features, and of course Figma had the advantage of being cross-platform but that was a non-issue for me as Sketch introduced web-based previews for clients.
The reason why I ditched Sketch (even though I loved it) was because Sketch had quality control issues over time and they started messing with my work, even losing some of it (cloud saves). The frustration grew over a longer period of time until I lost all hope and just had to admit that it was a lost cause. I peeked at Sketch's changelogs for a year and saw only bugfixes and no features. I assumed it was dead; either way the chapter was closed, the entire company shifted to Figma.
P.S. which is not to say that Figma is in a good state now, or that I don't feel history repeating itself.
Sketch's biggest drawback was they only build a Mac app. The "mac app" space will get you consistent business but you will never grow your company to the scale of Figma or Adobe.
It's funny how the successes and failures of these two companies ultimately comes down to a single architectural decision that both took different paths on. Sketch's biggest drawback (even back in the 2010's when they were on top) was always that they didn't support Web, Windows or Linux and focused only on Mac's. Honestly it paved the way for Figma to just come up and eat their lunch.
The biggest mistake that Sketch made was not realizing there was a sea change sooner and shifting their focus to a web based app or even releasing Windows and Linux clients. Even now I went to their website and they only offer basic viewing tools on the web, if you want to create with Sketch you need a Mac and there's no way around that.
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I don’t have the entire history of the two apps in front of me, but Sketch was definitely first, and from what I recall, Figma copied them, at least initially.
Macromedia Fireworks was the modern predecessor of these tools that ushered web graphics back in the dot com days. It was bought by Adobe, and shuttered around 2009.
I loved that tool
Still keep a machine on Mojave to use FW CS 6 and will probably eventually have a VM running it to use it, it’s a distinctive combination of features.
Congratulations to everyone who made this company go. That said, this company's growth seems threatened by AI adoption rather than boosted by it.
One thing I thought would have been incredibly useful for me is to go from HTML -> Figma
There is a ton of focus on going from Figma to something you could presumably dump into react or html. But I found nothing in the reverse.
Realistically, for a lot of applications, there are more things in production than in Figma. It's just not practical to spec everything out when you're moving fast. But when you do want someone to look at it or tinker, it's a huge lift to migrate your current production to Figma. I wish they would use some AI for that. Just take a webpage, and build the Figma design docs. Doesn't even have to be perfect, just good enough to get help from designers
The feature we need most is Figma > SwiftUI, etc. The ability to take the Figma UIs and export to web and mobile would be such a time saver.
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There is a Storybook-to-Figma [0] plugin, the same company built a whole slew of X-to-figma plugins.
[0] https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1075741140914731351/s...
Ah yes Dreamweaver. Look how well that turned out.
Turs out people don't want "quick dump as HTML" but rather "maintainable, understandable, performant HTML". I don't see how that has changed with AI.
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Take your current project, then run `figma-cli-ai --fix` and have a modern design.
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Check out html.to.design
I want to be able to refactor designs, and not entirely from the command line. I do not see why Figma should not be able to do this. Coding comes later.
They’re adopting AI so that designers within figma can create. I don’t know whether this is good or bad (I don’t design) but if the tool everyone uses to mock things up gains coding abilities, we’re cooked.
You’ll be able to go from figma to production in weeks.
And we'll have 10x of the Tea app incidents.
AI tools are still just that tools - they're not abstraction layers from "intent" to "production product".
There's also code snippets so that developers can provide the HTML or React or whatever code to implement a component or set thereof. And that stuff feeds into an MCP server, so that in theory an AI / code assistant can implement a design in whichever framework you build in, but within some limits if you provide the right code.
It won't just be figma. The market is already filling up with lots of players in this space.
There may be no moats. Just distribution winners.
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It'll depend on other vendors to make the models who will eat up all the margins
"but if the tool everyone uses to mock things up gains coding abilities"
adobe tried this 10 years ago (Adobe dream weaver) and failed
I literally can drag and drop design photos from drawing board to claude or open ai chat and they recreate it themselves instead of needing figma
not sure where you know that "we are cooked" its for them not us
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Most of the offering is from current shareholders, not new shares issued. That’s non-dilutive I presume but also raises less funds for the company. Who has the privilege of selling at offer time? Employees I imagine are locked up and the stock will take a dump in 6 months.
No you absolutely can sell as employee. For that you have employees determine how many shares they would be willing to offer up for sale initially as part of the roadshow. The catch is that shares sold during the roadshow will then not have a price yet, because the price per share in the IPO is determined by the demand and what underwriters are willing to pay during roadshow negotiations. The lockup period starts after. Additionally, insiders can negotiate structured sales during the lockup (e.g. in the event the PPS gains significantly), but they again have to say how much they would be willing to sell without knowing the exact price.
And it turns out that price is $33/share.
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So what's the alternative? Is open source solutions catching up?
There's Penpot[1], but it's not as good as Figma, currently.
[1]: https://penpot.app/
In what ways?
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https://penpot.app/ is doing pretty well and quite well featured!
Penpot (open source, web-based) has gained significant traction with a 4.0 release this year that added real-time collaboration and improved developer handoff features, while Inkscape and Krita continue to mature as desktop alternatives.
I randomly came across an app called Lunacy the other day, from stock vector and image marketplace Icons8.
I decided to give it a try. It’s pitched as a Figma alternative, but as essentially an expensive advertisement for Icons8 (the stock marketplace is built into the app), I didn’t have very high expectations.
Honestly, I was blown away. As a product designer who relies on a lot of advanced Figma functionality, I wouldn’t rely on it as my daily driver, but for a side project? I would choose it over Sketch. It covers all the basics of a modern UI design application, and even a few of the more recent additions to Figma like color variables. I’m surprised I haven’t seen more coverage of it.
Why what's happening with Figma?
The thinking is that an IPO will encourage them to reduce the app’s functionality except for enterprise tiers.
The technical term is enshittification.
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> Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, Allen & Company LLC, and J.P. Morgan are acting as joint lead book-running managers for the offering
Can someone explain the advantage of simultaneously having these four massive companies as book runners?
More IBs (Syndicate) => More book building through more connections
Couple reasons, spread the risk and increase the possible people to sell to.
S-1 SEC file here: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025...
Great product. How they adapt AI in a way that doesn't alienate but empowers their core ICP will be important
I don't think they can afford to be a follower on AI but being a leader will also be untenable.
Is this the start signal for impending enshittification? Now that the actual customers of Figma are the shareholders?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44737346
There have always been shareholders. Now you can be one too, if you would like.
Entshittification incoming August 1 then?
It may take a bit longer than that, but don't worry, it will happen eventually.
I am not a designer but i used figma a lot for website projects. It is good but it took sooooooo long to load the files... even though I downloaded a desktop, still very slow.. anybody met with the same issue?
Stock is up 227% on base price. Figma wasn’t reliably profitable until very recently. Generated real cash in 2022, posted an inflated paper profit in 2023, took a one-time GAAP loss in 2024.
We are in a bubble.
The IPO price started from $25 last week and ended at $33 due to increased demand. If it opens at the high range the company would be worth exactly what Adobe bid for it ($20B).
$19.8 billion market cap to save everyone from doing research
I remember the first viral blog posts about the drawing tools made for Figma. It was amazing to see so much love and attention to detail with the basic tools done so right. It reminded me more of FreeHand or Canvas or Xara than Adobe, which was a great thing. But those diamonds are now lost in the rough of a bad user interface and an app that has become progressively slower over the years. And we're still missing basic tools that the classic apps I mentioned had 35 years ago.
In the age of AI following Figma UI mock-ups has become a bottleneck; I spend more time on wrestling with styles than on actual functionality. Figma could have provided a way to integrate with LLMs, but the only thing they have is an MCP server which is behind the paid subscription and requires their desktop app...
Style management is a huge time sink with so much repetitive busy work. Interestingly, they could foresee this even in their earliest whiteboard plans. https://twitter.com/soleio/status/1950817111116312808
Great outcome for everyone involved (as predicted) from the insiders, VCs and the early employees.
Now, the enshittification, price increases and lock-in begins when they ring the opening bell to list on the NYSE.
What an incredible journey!
Congratulations to Dylan and Evan and everyone who built this company.
Well it looks like I missed the boat. Current price $137.
That was quite fast - they filed an S1 in the beginning of July...
Is that a bad thing?
I see people, surely more versed in ipos than me, mention enshittification.
is this happening with most ipos? what green flags should we look at as hits that "this company is different"?
> green flags should we look at as hits that "this company is different"?
The only possible green flag os "Did not ipo"
in your exp, what % of ipo'd companies are still goated?
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the main driver of enshittificiation is that you need to grow profits. the problem is: your user adoption will have peaked at some point. you can then raise prices, which will also plateau. the last step is to enshittify your products to increase the margin by providing less for the same money and "reduce costs" (kick out the people/services that made the product good in the first place). the profit driven growth chasing will then kill off the product and the "capital" (shareholders) will move off to the next thing to gut and kill off for a bit of revenue.
it's sustainable if it doesn't need growth (and market beating growth at that). that would be a green flag.
thanks, that sounds like a good approximation of reality
it's a sad reality, I wish we've found the cure already, or perhaps nothing is broken and I just have to zoom out (for ex., smaller bow-and-arrow players now have a chance to take down the nerfed mastodon)
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I'd love to see a thousand good canvas systems bloom.
Congrats to Figma on building well the first time though! The deliberately craft thought out web architecture made a difference!
How many months do we have to migrate until complete enshittification? Can we realistically expect like 6 more months of life?
wasn't figma like the "new kid" 6 years ago and now it's the second adobe? who is the new new kid? was there something called miro or mira or..?
who's buying?
I'm sure plenty of people will make plenty of money. We don't work for them and we won't be able to buy at the IPO price, but the wheel keeps on turning.
Prediction: in 180 days it's below first tick
Edit: I said IPO but I meant first tick.
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You can submit a conditional offer to buy on IPO day with your broker (I do this with E*Trade). You will have to fill out a form with more questions than normal, and are not necessarily guaranteed an allotment at the IPO price.
Edit (1 hour later): I was allocated 2 shares @ $33. My request was for 100 shares, fwiw.
RH hasn't opened up IPO access in my country, will need to wait for the options market to open unfortunately.
Can't wait for "increasing shareholder value" to run it into the ground.
Figma is one of the worst evils of capitalism. Considered a leader in UIUX design software while its own UIUX is abysmal, full of amateur level mistakes, inconsistencies and bad patterns. We have now a generation of designers that take Figma’s UX as an example to learn from and implement in their designs. To be a good designer today you have to learn to actively reject what Figma teaches you.
what else you could expect - Figma was born out of founder’s need to find a proof of concept test case for real-time collaboration JavaScript engine they created. They stumbled on this idea. Back then everyone used Sketch and wanted better prototyping and interaction design, and Figma appeared with its real time collaboration as major point which you used once just to try and never again. For occasional demos and in large organisations maybe it is useful, but with your average design team size is one person it’s not a problem to solve first. And yet despite having this real time collaboration you still couldn’t collaboratively present your design. You have to shout all the time “and now, what screen you’re on, what do you see?, yes click on that button on the left”. It shows how to this day, the UX is not at the table at Figma. They focus on opening offices all over the world and courting big clients. Because need growth, IPO.
Figma was first to employ an army of customer support “yes men” with sole task to answer in support forums and defuse frustrations this way, thus allowing Figma instead of fixing embarrassing bugs for years, to divert development resources to products nobody asked for, to fuel that growth.
Figma has became a product for investors rather than designers. And doing that it poisoned the design community, normalised bad UX and business practices.
About collaborative presentation, can't you click on the user icon (usually top right) for whoever's leading and figma will follow the screen to their cursor?
I distinctly remember that it's possible in Miro, and I'm pretty sure figma too. I think the problem you bring up has been pretty much solved.
I was referring to prototype viewing, not the design community
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Yes you can.
I disagree. Designers are not dumb and understand tools and UX pretty well. There is a reason why it became so popular.
I would like to know about design tools that are so much better than Figma. I am trying to actively avoid it because it’s Thiel company but it is pretty hard.
Don't know what you're on about. I use Figma to design UI/UX all the time and have found great value in the RTC features. In fact like you say, I was using Sketch before (and tried Framer for a while), but Figma's collaborative features have been invaluable and so we use it for everything.
Jumping from "I don't need the features this popular software provides" to "Figma is one of the worst evils of capitalism" is a ridiculous leap.
> and now, what screen you’re on, what do you see?
There's a "follow me" feature to see what other users are doing. It's been around for several years.
I was referring to prototype viewing, Not about viewing the design itself.
Why do many people not understand this? It's bloated. And doesn't do it's core competency (hint UI/UX design) well.
> to divert development resources to products nobody asked for, to fuel that growth.
Isn’t the growth proof that those products ARE what people want (whether or not they ask for it)?
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Hard to imagine that interaction not being an immediate disqualifier for every single tech employee.
The name of the company certainly does raise eyebrows. And from what I 'member from back in ye day, the Musk controversy actually helped them to raise users in the end because everyone and their dog was talking about Musk and him assuming getting hit by a "ligma" joke. That thing was all over the Internet.
How is that at all relevant? Can we please stop injecting Elon Musk into every single HN conversation?
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Can AI replace Figma workflows?
The current product _must_ simply be a funding mechanism for whatever AI solution will ultimately define them. The idea that we’ll continue to have rigidly defined design mockups and specification seems relatively naive compared to generative UX defined by the user and their interaction preferences.
Imagine in that future world you describe, how immensely valuable a human artist will be: originality, wit, brilliance, their design will completely conquer any competitor generating the slop you dream of.
Agreed. I do still worry that this will upend the status quo. As with any ecosystem: slow changes are fine, but fast changes can be catastrophic.
I’ve worked with many people over the years who are good enough at their job, but will be replaced by AI (management’s choice, not mine). I’m probably one of those people as a mediocre engineer who prioritized family over career.
I have some backup plans, but it’s still tough and going to affect lots of people.
That will always be valuable, but I don’t think that’s what most designers are doing. If AI can copy flat design and Corporate Memphis style, it’ll compete just fine with the average designer.
We must live in different realities because most design has almost no creativity or originality at all. "Good design" means the website/design looks exactly the same as everything else.
We have the tools to do anything imaginable with film and video but the top box office films right now in the US are all completely derivative, non-creative human slop.
"Good design" is so trivial to do with generative AI.
We hardly live in 1910 Paris with all the cool people drinking absinthe in between cranking out all these artistic masterpieces.
As much as a skilled potter making fancy coffee cups conquers IKEA. Most people don't care about craftsmanship, and our economy nudges everyone towards convenient slop.