Comment by robenkleene
5 days ago
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.
Hmm, feels more related to how big the imported assets and final exports are, and how fast + accurate previews are, rather than who does the export? If I'm dealing with GB size videos and image files, local is going to have performance and storage cost advantages so that's why local makes more sense for e.g. movie editors and high-end photoshop work? A lot of terminal based development work could be done via a web app without a problem for example with the big plus of sidestepping complex local dev setup but it becomes less attractive when real-time graphics are involved.
Figma files are relatively light so previews and exports are fast - you can't even import images that are more than a few MB.
There are many types of work where large assets aren't important, e.g., illustration, 2D animation, CAD, 3D sculpting (I think? A lot of 3D work that doesn't need pre-rendered assets have really small file sizes), and as far as I know none of these have hugely popular web apps like Figma?
Also remote solutions like Jump Desktop (https://jumpdesktop.com) are pretty popular in the media editing world, so folks are choosing to edit remotely, they just aren't using web apps to do so.
So I still think the unique combination that Figma has is that unskilled folks are viewing, commenting, and editing on the document along with designers themselves, using the same tool. And that's facilitated by the tool itself being relatively simple. It's a common workflow that we see with the office suite software that I mentioned.
> There are many types of work where large assets aren't important, e.g., illustration, 2D animation, CAD, 3D sculpting (I think? A lot of 3D work that doesn't need pre-rendered assets have really small file sizes), and as far as I know none of these have hugely popular web apps like Figma?
Maybe just a matter of time? I'm not familiar with all these domains, but I'm sure there's vendor lock-in, proprietary file formats, integrations/automations, plugin ecosystems, and general popularity/momentum (plus maybe lack of full GPU and other hardware support?) for certain tools that make it hard to switch and slows down competition. It wasn't that long ago that spreadsheet and word processor software being local only was the norm either.
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