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.
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.
Most of those areas I listed already have web apps, they just aren't popular (I'd argue because there just isn't much need for them). I've written about how shockingly quickly adoption usually happens when market opportunity presents itself https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...
In this case, `asm.js`, which was the original the core technology that made any of this possible, was released in 2013, which is ancient in this day and age.
It's normally very fast from technology to creation of the initial product to wide-spread adoption (typically about five years from release of the first version, per my blog post). So more likely if this does happen, it will require another core technology breakthrough, e.g., `asm.js` (now WebAssembly) isn't enough to facilitate it on its own.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
You'd lose things like shared components within and between files/libraries, interactive prototypes, shared design-tokens/variables, and responsive layout features, which is huge if your team are all-in with UI design system stuff. If you're mostly doing mockups, coding them, then copy/pasting old mockups to create new ones without using an extensive component system, SVG export is more bearable.
For UI work, it's much harder to be productive in a regular SVG editor like Inkscape though compared to something like Penpot.
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.
> 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.
> 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
Hmm, can you explain more about why the Apple APIs were important for this? Isn't the screen rendering for UI design content modest compared to what cross platform 3D games at the time had to render?
Personally I think comparing media editing apps to games is a bit of a fallacy because their goals and programming practices are so different. There's an 18 part series from ProVideo Coalition that's about this subject through the lens of After Effects https://www.provideocoalition.com/after-effects-performance-...
> 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.
> 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.
balsaqmiq was nice many many years ago, but then i found pingendo. Used it heavily, but it was buggy and short lived... web frameworks moved on and they abandoned the project very soon..
have to say that my customers never seem to understand the mockups created with balsamiq..
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'm a big proponent of native apps — but credit where it's due, Figma is just one of the slickest web apps. The performance is amazing, and it really never feels like it suffers from being in browser.
>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.
I think so? There are some small changes here and there, new integrations are added as they go.
They are not getting investments anymore AFAIK, but they're profitable because of the paying users.
I don't think you have to add X features every hour to stay relevant. The software is pretty powerful at this state already, and I might be discovered 15% of its capabilities probably, despite using it relatively heavily.
I don't use their API, but the search works for my scenarios. I'm not an heavy commenter, but it never failed in their app (which is supposedly Electron based) and Firefox for me.
Did you open tickets for these? Some Notion developers frequent here I believe, maybe you can reach them if they provide contact information?
I always found it beneficial to reach-out to provider/developer. The results were not positive all the time, but at least I managed to add an entry to their bug tracker, and the problems are solved 99% of the time, after some time.
I've stopped using it years ago, Figma as well. First I went down the Zettelkasten/Obsidian rabbithole but ended up just using Apple notes. I've ditched Figma too because I was faster with code using design systems and UI components.
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.
I think your mainly indexing on the word I used "technical", because yes I agree I'd also categorize creating a design system as "technical". But it's technical in a different way than say, creating a glass material in a 3D modeling program, or simulating 3D effects in a 2D image-editing program. So I mean the way the latter is technical, not the former, if there's a better word than technical to use here, I'm all ears (maybe "skilled"?).
The key difference in the specific context of Figma is that a layman without any technical skills can give pretty good feedback on a design system, but say, wouldn't be able to give good feedback on how a 3D modeling material is constructed.
> which apparently using the gradient setting in photoshop is a Big Scary Skill™ that flat design solved
This isn't what I mean, I meant combining layers to create 3D effects like this https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/kj9yut/guide_to... i.e., creating the gradient itself isn't complicated, it's composing layers to achieve a specific effect that's complicated (and "technical").
I guess I didn't really address the split in roles you mentioned which is accurate, but I think flat design is what facilitated (and makes possible) that split.
E.g., you couldn't do this with the type of design I was doing in the 2000s, because the assets we were making didn't scale and recontexualize as easily as flat design elements. I.e., I think flat design not only paved the way for Figma, but also design systems in general.
> They're composing already defined "atoms" into the "molecules" of components and pages.
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.
Well, I've asked ChatGPT with your prompt and came out with a very long comment. Asking to shorten it, we get:
"Figma is basically Google Docs for design — a fast, browser-based tool where multiple people can edit the same UI file in real time. No installs, no emailing files around.
Its magic as a business is the frictionless onboarding (just share a link), viral team adoption, and a freemium model that naturally expands into enterprise contracts. Works cross‑platform, so it spreads fast.
That combo — great product + viral growth + strong enterprise lock‑in — is why it became the design platform and why Adobe was ready to pay billions for it."
In the longer form it was also enthusiastic about the WASM part, but that didn't make the cut.
Looking forward to seeing an LLM that can produce good design. Figma is working on this themselves, they have the distribution, so even it came to pass why wouldn’t they own the market? They have the data and the resources to buy more.
That’s not what I mean. Designers can work with any tool to produce a design, and then Claude or Gemini or whatever are quite capable of turning that design into working React code or HTML or whatever.
I mean in the future there are probably no PMs, Designers or Engineers. All those roles are going to converge. There will be a bunch of people that build and manage the software that creates software.
you can create a lot of wealth for yourself by finding the bigger fool so to speak. And arguably, that's what a lot of tech IPOs are in any case, so why single out Figma for engaging in the practice?
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.
You've got all the players named, but I do believe there was a time inbetween where Sketch was noteworthy, if not as a market leader, then as the most notable rising star.
> 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.
And yet, I cannot stop myself of thinking about that native architecture decision whenever my beefed up Mac Studio takes a minute to load a mediocre-sized Figma project and struggles to keep up as I try to navigate it, just so that I can leave a couple of comments somewhere.
I will say that some outsourcing phases/efforts would definitely not be possible with Sketch though. It's one thing when we as a company all have company-provided Macs, but another when remote hiring/collaborating.
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.
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.
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
Anyone with good SwiftUIfu care to take over? Then hopefully jsx-lite gets submitted to the ES specs like E4X. Then we can have UI write once and runs in all places.
It certainly did. It was the OG of "no-code" or "low-code".
But like no-code or low-code, the niche in which it's useful to a business is limited. I commonly say that if software (esp FLOSS) serves even only one person well, it's a success. By that criteria, it was massively successfull.
But 27 years later, we are still mostly writing "html" (or jxl, or whatever todays frontendframework has come up with) by "hand". Or writing code that churns out this HTML for us. And not dragging around stuff in Dreamweaver.
Some figma-export will serve niches, some of which I probably cannot imagine even. Prototyping, one-offs, cousin-erik-building-james-craft-brewery-site, etc. But even combined with generative- or transformative AI, it won't serve as the source for UI "code".
If by “people” you mean “developers”, then yes you’re right. But I don’t think anyone else ever really cared.
The problem with Dreamweaver is that you still needed a developer to upload and run the site. And back then, you couldn’t run single page applications (web stacks hadn’t evolved that far yet), so still needed developers to write the backend.
Thus there wasn’t a huge amount to gain in using Dreamweaver for the professional world.
AI has changed that in that it doesn’t have the same limitations as Dreamweaver. However, like yourself, I don’t think we’ll see AI replace developers. Or at least the current crop of LLMs still have a long way to go before they can be used without developer oversight.
Edit: also worth noting that Flash was everywhere back then too. So many web designers opted for Flash instead.
I actually do see developers being replaced by AI. But only certain roles and only after it solves the issues that e.g. Dreamweaver did not solve.
Building stuff from scratch is easy. AI can do it, dreamweaver could, that sweatshop worker on fiverr, newest junior hire, etc.
Maintaining legacy isn't. AI isn't there yet: at most it can replace existing with new, but it cannot "understand" context, history, The Reason Why Kevin Built This Weird Unintelligable Abstraction, or how the three different ways of validating an email are actually a business requirement.
Let alone building stuff that withstands the decay of real constraints and time.
I've been around long enough (30+ years software dev/engineer) to have seen this decay over and over and to know what works and what doesn't (It's a people issue, hardly a technical one).
I've never seen AI, that sweatshop worker on fiverr, newest junior hire, or any low- or no-code tool, amongst which Dreamweaver, churn out something that's easy to change, maintainable for months, years, decades.
There's software that gets a few hours a year of attention and keeps running, securely, performant. That can be picked up, changed or added to and deployed in hours. And there's software that will explode the moment you even glance at the files, let alone anyone fixing, updating, or g*d forbid, adding features to.
AI generated stuff almost exclusively falls in the last category. And we don't have anything AI around yet that can do this fixing, updating, adding features for us.
So currently it successfully replaces many of the code monkeys, fiverr-freelancers and junior devs churning out forever-greenfield-projects. But little else.
Sure, but I’ve seen plenty of senior co-workers deliver a pile of dynamite in Java and get a bonus for it, abandoning it to some other poor sod who will have to fix and maintain it. Managers who reward that behavior will probably be the ones who try to AI Everything, and it’ll probably work for just long enough to make all the devs redundant.
Yea. To be clear. With "senior" I did not mean "developers with over 16 months of experience" but developers that have failed spectacularly, several times, learned from that, and now strive to avoid these, and related mistakes.
A junior can never be that, due to lack of the experience. But too many long-term developers haven't failed, or haven't learned from these mistakes.
For example, about five years ago, I worked a few months with a 40+ years-of-experience software developer, who worked almost his entire life on one single product (in C++ and Java) in one company, solo. I was asked to assess if/how it was possible to get new people for this project because he was retiring.
Part of the code was marvelous and a true beauty. Other parts were horrors or inintelligable mess. He truly did not like Java (at first) so a giant part of the java codebase was there to make it look-and-feel somewhat like his (also non-standard) C++.
Ironically, the nice parts were those that were hardly touched or changed - infrastructure, boilerplate, etc. But the worst parts were those that needed frequent changes due to business demands or the ever changing outside world. He honestly never realized that there were patterns and systems (by now), to keep software manageable under real-world-demands and changes. That turned also to be the saving of this project: he loved "DDD" and "Design Patterns" (both he heard about, but never dove into), and implemented some core ideas in this project before handing it over: anti-corruption-layers, ports-adapters, dependency-injection, testing.
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.
Adobe is going to get absolutely trounced by GenAI. They've got so many competitors coming at them from all angles.
Also, innovation capital (engineers at startups) experience outsized rewards at startups when disruption happens. The better engineers will flock to more nimble outfits and reap the benefits.
Adobe has been thinking about GenAI longer than you probably have (probably added because this is HN and you never know).
I got to talk to a product engineer about some of their work back in 2021, and he was describing generative (and even generative-editive) capabilities they had in hand that most associate with the last two years, they were just figuring out how to productize them, many of which they have.
I have my own complaints about Adobe products and choices but they are far from out of the game, and they’re probably going to be fine, especially if a lot of people make the mistake of thinking of them primarily as a dinosaur Figma competitor.
Adobe has SOOO much money though that it will take a giant force to unseat them. Not to say we shouldn’t keep trying (I love Krita) but they have made sure they’re on the top of the totem pole. Complete with spyware on every designers computer.
This. I heard "gimp is free and will kill Adobe within a year or two" from 1997 or so. As much as I hate Adobe's methods it still wins hands down in UX for image editing. So, as a hobbyist, I have no plans to cancel my subscription.
I wish for some real competition in this space, but it will take a LOT of effort to dethrone Adobe. My 2c.
Yes, and it's not clear that those startups will fare better than gimp.
Adobe spends inordinate amount of effort to understand the problems that users are solving and make UX that users love. As the result Adobe has tons of money to improve the product. Users curse its business practices, white an occasional "goodbye Adobe" or "FU" messages but keep buying subscriptions.
The moat around this should not be underestimated. My 2c.
There is no love for Adobe. Those subscriptions are begrudgingly held.
The new breed of tools can already do your Adobe workflow. There simply is nothing for Adobe to add to the table.
Adobe had a huge moat for image and video tools because they were historically very hard to develop. Now it's easy for anyone to models up to a new UX and deliver 90% of the useful surface area of Adobe Photoshop.
Adobe's labyrinth of menus is legacy. That's not how editing of the future will work.
Besides, the number of creators is going to increase by at least an order of magnitude, if not more. Those creators are growing up on new tools. Adobe is stuffy. Someone using CapCut is never going to download Adobe Creative Cloud.
> Adobe had a huge moat forimage and video tools because they were historically very hard to develop. ... Adobe's labyrinth of menus is legacy.
I am not sure. I heard the same arguments from the gimp crowd for years. But they always kept talking about solving their own problems (programmatic changing of imagery for web development), not the problems creative, non programmer users had and were willing to pay for solving (interactive manipulation based on visual feedback, which is how many creative types tend to work). They vehemently opposed improvements that were critical for hobbyists and professionals, like insisting on staying with 8-bit colors forever.
As a result, 25+ years later, gimp is a niche tools with its main draw being that it is free. Adobe spent a lot of time understanding workflows of target users.
When I, a pure hobbyist, work on my photos in Photoshop my feeling is immediately "ah, it really does what I want". As much as I hate Adobe business practices I gladly pay their subscription ransom to have Photoshop when I process my travel pictures.
I am not sure the new crowd understands paying users (and not "I will use it for free and watch ads" folks) any better than gimp used to. But I wish them luck. My 2c.
Figma is a whole lot easier to replace actually you can now actually with a self host OSS that came up with and bring your own api key from antrophic or open ai
entire design industry???? like are you sure that there are people out there works using photoshops,premier,illustrator etc that want more complex tool set???
Not a single person wants more complex tools. They want more capable tools maybe but never ever a more complex on. What is the benefit of increasing complexity except to show off?
Are you in design? How does increasing complexity benefit you personally?
While technically, Figma is just a web app tool. Replacing it would be hard. It has a ton of features, it’s well designed, it exports working wireframe mock ups you can use to demonstrate functionality. It’s good software.
Figma is what all the designers are using. If they turn that into a Claude for design and add the ability to complete the wireframes with AI generated code. There’s no need for engineers until after acquisition. Just maintenance.
The difference here is - Adobe tried using a proprietary stack. Figma can spit React. Everyone knows React - even if you use something else. It’s perfect timing with AI coding agents and every, single, UX team using it.
"Figma is what all the designers are using. If they turn that into a Claude for design and add the ability to complete the wireframes with AI generated code"
You can literally do this NOW without needing figma
Yeah, but I think the point is that designers are already using figma. There’s no mass exodus of designers from figma looking for an AI solution to replace it. So figma has a large paying base to which it can introduce AI generated code (which it has done to some degree already anyway).
like I said earlier, I don't think you need that feature since the only drowback you screenshoot the figma design paste it chatbox and it works
like literally require minimal effort, like do you think this designer so "technology" ill ??? so they need the chatbox and preview page directly into the same page?
One main difference is performance. Penpot becomes unusuably laggy in some situations (like when you use raster images). Penpot made bet on .svg rendered directly using browsers. They thought these engines will become fast enough.
Figma renders everything with webgl in their own engine and has 0 performance issues.
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.
That’s been going on for a while with Figma. Their core user base (at least historically core) generally feels neglected, because they’ve been trying to go horizontal with a slew of related products. Meanwhile they’re charging designers to use variables.
Yup, I'll confirm this 100%. I do not like Figma and have 0 trust and optimism about it; I use it because I have to and will ditch it at the first corner, probably for Penpot. When you have trivial-to-fix bug reports with hundreds of comments and votes collecting dust for 3-4 years, you lose all respect from your userbase.
My hope is that at least with Penpot I can submit a PR if I am motivated enough. With Figma, I've done all I can.
Charging more money for features is not enshittificaton. Making the product worse like adding advertisements would be.
A full professional seat is $16 for individual, $55 for organizations and $90 for enterprises. Either price is a nothing burger for a professional tool.
There are plenty of textbook cases of enshittification that are covered by price increases—just look at Adobe and AutoCAD selling credits that are used just to launch the program. As long as it fits with the "claw back value from your customers and partners to feed your investors" pattern, ∂shit > 0.
Adobe has always been targetted at profressionals price wise. Making it SaaS made pirating harder and the high monthly price (and annoying dark patterns) excluded and alienated the general public which upset people who decided to pay for it for the first time in their life. The problem there is mostly the lack of good competition in spaces like Lightroom but that's starting to change. The everyone-pirates-photoshop so don't bother trying to compete idea is now over.
They're alienating plenty of paying customers as well. Many people will not pay to rent software, and I expect that number will increase as the number of companies trying to collect rent on software increases. Because $10/month (let alone whatever adobe is trying to charge) never sounds like a lot, but multiply by the number of pieces of software (let alone some non-software flirting with the same gimmick) you regularly use and it quickly becomes absurd.
A secondary issue is that rent-a-software stuff is driven by pea counters and they'll never be able to resist constantly raising the price once they can increase revenue x% with an action that, in the short term, will probably result in absolutely no decline in users. Of course in the longer term they're setting the stage for their own disruption, obsolescence, and revenue trending to $0.
I also expect this whole business model will be heavily regulated in the future, because what percent of recurring revenue, especially on things like mobile, is from people who simply forget to cancel or were not aware it was recurring in the first place?
It’s not just software rental. Every online shop or service is turning towards revenue extraction by targeted pricing: Services that look at your IRS records or other public clues, and hop, you train travel, Amazon listing, car repairs are billed higher, exactly at your purchasing power.
Yesterday there was an article saying an AI is used to infer the “right pricing for you”, and suspected it used variables such as your skin color, gender, job and location, probably discriminatory but mangled in a big AI engine.
In fact, I’d sell a REST API for adaptive pricing to mum & pop shops if I had time.
> upset people who decided to pay for it for the first time in their life
It also upset paying customers. It's no longer possible to _own_ Adobe software, and so I don't anymore. Up until just a couple years ago I was still using the copy of Photoshop CS4 I paid for (as part of the Master Collection CS4, Student Edition) in 2008.
A monthly subscription is a complete non-starter for me.
You never owned any Adobe product, you licensed it. And that license could be revoked at any time; while it is unlikely Adobe would go after an individual, the license that you agree to allows them to do so.
Adobe can say whatever they want in their EULA; whether it's legally enforceable in court is another matter.
Imagine how these you-own-a-license-not-the-thing-itself shenanigans would play out for any other product we purchase. "No, you didn't buy that $40k car in cash upfront! You only bought Toyota's permission to operate the car, and we reserve the right to repossess it at any time."
> Tesla used to sell Model S vehicles with software-locked battery packs. This was a way to offer different range options without having to make production more complicated with different battery pack sizes.
> Later, Tesla started to offer owners of those software-locked vehicles the option to unlock the capacity for an additional cost. Tesla phased out the practice over the years, but the company still used software-locked battery packs when doing warranty replacements of battery packs of certain capacities that it doesn’t produce anymore.
Upgrading the head unit for a 2013 Model S triggered an error and reverted this old generation battery to software lock.
This clearly was a software bug and Tesla reverted it for all customers using these older batteries.
This has literally nothing to do with subscriptions (the word subscribe isn’t even in the article once). I don’t even think you read the article.
> Car is sold twice since, and now has a new owner (my customer). It says 90, badged 90, has 90-type range.
> He has the car for a few months, goes in and does a paid MCU2 upgrade at Tesla after the 3G shutdown.
> ...
> Tesla told him that he had to pay $4,500 to unlock the capability:
It's all in the article.
You can get all stuck-up about the word "subscription" but guy goes into Tesla for a non-battery related service and loses 2/3 thirds of the range the car claimed it had unless he forks over 5k.
Well the problem with Adobe is that some of the really crucial tools are essentialy abandoned.
InDesing for example is used for every printed book, magazine, packaging, poster… ever. Industry standard with insane amount of users.
Yet InDesign basically didn’t change since CS6. It got some mostly minor features but that is like 12 years of nothing. The app also got more unstable and only thing they work on is making their fileformat incompatible with prior versions.
That means paying 50+ usd month for licensing a software that hates you but you are required to have it. Perfect monopoly capture.
I 'member Adobe's Creative Suite costing hundreds of dollars. Photoshop alone clocked in at 699$, the full CS6 was 2599$ [1]. Either you were a professional and paid dearly every odd year or you were a student and used a cracked/keygen'd CS6.
Today? The full CC license is 70$ a month for individuals (30$ for students) and 100$ a month for businesses. Despite inflation, assuming a two year upgrade cycle you still get the same price for the full Adobe package when comparing CS vs CC.
One may complain a lot about Adobe (RIP Flash, and anything Gen AI can go to hell for all I care), but "enshittification" is one thing that can't reasonably be thrown at them.
As for Adobe Credits, AFAIK that's credits for fonts and assets - and again, I vastly prefer dealing with one storefront (Adobe) than having to buy and license individual font files or stock photos.
You just successfully rationalized the exact tactic that Adobe sales team pitched to their leadership: That most users will pay the monthly subscription because the math “evens out.”
Very very very few people have a legitimate need to upgrade Adobe product versions every 2 years.
> Very very very few people have a legitimate need to upgrade Adobe product versions every 2 years.
I suspect that most, even a lot of professional users, could get along just fine with CS1 or CS2. The core functionality hasn’t changed all that much and in a lot of ways, CS/CC apps have gotten worse. The only reason these individuals aren't still using those old versions is because they aren’t well suited for modern machines.
I’d personally be elated if Adobe started selling a lightly modernized single-purchase Photoshop CS1, even if it cost what single purchase PS licenses used to. The lack of cruft and UI churn alone would be worth it before even getting into the savings compared to a subscription.
As a hobbyist, I owned CS4 (purchased on sale) and kept using it for ages. Turning it into a subscription might be fine for bleeding edge professionals who care about whatever new bells and whistles every year to finish a job 2% faster, but the ongoing costs cut out anybody who isn’t making money with it.
Thankfully there are better competitors like Affinity in that space now.
It's enshittification because most people don't need the 2 year upgrade cycle. For most individuals and small businesses, it was more like buy once and use forever.
A majority or at least large minority of Adobe users were/are on Macs.
The Mac version has lived through 68K MacOS pre and post System 7, PPC Mac pre and post OS X, x86 Macs pre and post Carbon support and now ARM Macs. After each transition , there was a limited amount of time that you could use the same version and even a smaller amount of time that you would have wanted to.
But the same argument applies that applies to Figma. It’s a professional tool that should help you generate income far greater than the cost
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?
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...
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 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.
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.
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.
Most of those areas I listed already have web apps, they just aren't popular (I'd argue because there just isn't much need for them). I've written about how shockingly quickly adoption usually happens when market opportunity presents itself https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...
In this case, `asm.js`, which was the original the core technology that made any of this possible, was released in 2013, which is ancient in this day and age.
It's normally very fast from technology to creation of the initial product to wide-spread adoption (typically about five years from release of the first version, per my blog post). So more likely if this does happen, it will require another core technology breakthrough, e.g., `asm.js` (now WebAssembly) isn't enough to facilitate it on its own.
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.
https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...
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.
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."
Heard the same story, but it was about cd burning, not printing.
> 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)
> 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.
You'd lose things like shared components within and between files/libraries, interactive prototypes, shared design-tokens/variables, and responsive layout features, which is huge if your team are all-in with UI design system stuff. If you're mostly doing mockups, coding them, then copy/pasting old mockups to create new ones without using an extensive component system, SVG export is more bearable.
For UI work, it's much harder to be productive in a regular SVG editor like Inkscape though compared to something like Penpot.
Exporting it, and exporting it fully editable are two very different expectations here.
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.
> 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.
> 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
Hmm, can you explain more about why the Apple APIs were important for this? Isn't the screen rendering for UI design content modest compared to what cross platform 3D games at the time had to render?
Personally I think comparing media editing apps to games is a bit of a fallacy because their goals and programming practices are so different. There's an 18 part series from ProVideo Coalition that's about this subject through the lens of After Effects https://www.provideocoalition.com/after-effects-performance-...
E.g., this one https://www.provideocoalition.com/after-effects-performance-...
> 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.
> 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.
+1. I still use Balsamiq. Their pricing is also very helpful.
balsaqmiq was nice many many years ago, but then i found pingendo. Used it heavily, but it was buggy and short lived... web frameworks moved on and they abandoned the project very soon.. have to say that my customers never seem to understand the mockups created with balsamiq..
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.
That's my feeling as well. I don't think I've started using (more) complex layers or effects, yet the same files started to seem taxing when open.
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.
I'm a big proponent of native apps — but credit where it's due, Figma is just one of the slickest web apps. The performance is amazing, and it really never feels like it suffers from being in browser.
>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.
I think so? There are some small changes here and there, new integrations are added as they go.
They are not getting investments anymore AFAIK, but they're profitable because of the paying users.
I don't think you have to add X features every hour to stay relevant. The software is pretty powerful at this state already, and I might be discovered 15% of its capabilities probably, despite using it relatively heavily.
Searching is buggy. Their api is buggy. Commenting sometimes fails in chrome.
I don't use their API, but the search works for my scenarios. I'm not an heavy commenter, but it never failed in their app (which is supposedly Electron based) and Firefox for me.
Did you open tickets for these? Some Notion developers frequent here I believe, maybe you can reach them if they provide contact information?
I always found it beneficial to reach-out to provider/developer. The results were not positive all the time, but at least I managed to add an entry to their bug tracker, and the problems are solved 99% of the time, after some time.
I've stopped using it years ago, Figma as well. First I went down the Zettelkasten/Obsidian rabbithole but ended up just using Apple notes. I've ditched Figma too because I was faster with code using design systems and UI components.
Being actively developed is usually the #1 reason apps/services become slow and buggy. You are not introducing bugs by not touching at the code.
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.
I think your mainly indexing on the word I used "technical", because yes I agree I'd also categorize creating a design system as "technical". But it's technical in a different way than say, creating a glass material in a 3D modeling program, or simulating 3D effects in a 2D image-editing program. So I mean the way the latter is technical, not the former, if there's a better word than technical to use here, I'm all ears (maybe "skilled"?).
The key difference in the specific context of Figma is that a layman without any technical skills can give pretty good feedback on a design system, but say, wouldn't be able to give good feedback on how a 3D modeling material is constructed.
> which apparently using the gradient setting in photoshop is a Big Scary Skill™ that flat design solved
This isn't what I mean, I meant combining layers to create 3D effects like this https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/kj9yut/guide_to... i.e., creating the gradient itself isn't complicated, it's composing layers to achieve a specific effect that's complicated (and "technical").
I guess I didn't really address the split in roles you mentioned which is accurate, but I think flat design is what facilitated (and makes possible) that split.
E.g., you couldn't do this with the type of design I was doing in the 2000s, because the assets we were making didn't scale and recontexualize as easily as flat design elements. I.e., I think flat design not only paved the way for Figma, but also design systems in general.
> They're composing already defined "atoms" into the "molecules" of components and pages.
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.
Glad i'm not the only one who saw it that way.
"Write me a comment for a hacker news comment that explains what figma is and why it's such a great business"
Well, I've asked ChatGPT with your prompt and came out with a very long comment. Asking to shorten it, we get:
"Figma is basically Google Docs for design — a fast, browser-based tool where multiple people can edit the same UI file in real time. No installs, no emailing files around.
Its magic as a business is the frictionless onboarding (just share a link), viral team adoption, and a freemium model that naturally expands into enterprise contracts. Works cross‑platform, so it spreads fast.
That combo — great product + viral growth + strong enterprise lock‑in — is why it became the design platform and why Adobe was ready to pay billions for it."
In the longer form it was also enthusiastic about the WASM part, but that didn't make the cut.
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.
Looking forward to seeing an LLM that can produce good design. Figma is working on this themselves, they have the distribution, so even it came to pass why wouldn’t they own the market? They have the data and the resources to buy more.
That’s not what I mean. Designers can work with any tool to produce a design, and then Claude or Gemini or whatever are quite capable of turning that design into working React code or HTML or whatever.
I mean in the future there are probably no PMs, Designers or Engineers. All those roles are going to converge. There will be a bunch of people that build and manage the software that creates software.
Just, Devil's Advocate, but..
I mean..
you can create a lot of wealth for yourself by finding the bigger fool so to speak. And arguably, that's what a lot of tech IPOs are in any case, so why single out Figma for engaging in the practice?
It is illegal to knowingly do this.
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.
You've got all the players named, but I do believe there was a time inbetween where Sketch was noteworthy, if not as a market leader, then as the most notable rising star.
Yeah, for a good period (roughly 10 years ago) my serious choices were between Photoshop and Sketch, with less of a clear winner.
At my former app dev agency, the design team stayed on Sketch + inVision until Figma was already very well established.
For those who are not as skilled in design, "AI" refers to Adobe Illustrator. :)
Never seen anyone design UIs in InDesign. Mostly they would go for Illustrator or Fireworks.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
And yet, I cannot stop myself of thinking about that native architecture decision whenever my beefed up Mac Studio takes a minute to load a mediocre-sized Figma project and struggles to keep up as I try to navigate it, just so that I can leave a couple of comments somewhere.
I will say that some outsourcing phases/efforts would definitely not be possible with Sketch though. It's one thing when we as a company all have company-provided Macs, but another when remote hiring/collaborating.
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.
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.
So not as much an IPO as an exit through the greater fool.
There’s a lot of fools in the world, all you have to make sure of is that you are not the last one.
— P.T. Barnum
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.
jsx-lite had it in experimental mode for a while: https://github.com/lamppkk/jsx-lite
Anyone with good SwiftUIfu care to take over? Then hopefully jsx-lite gets submitted to the ES specs like E4X. Then we can have UI write once and runs in all places.
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.
Dreamweaver was a widely used tool back in the day and definitely started a trend in web design tools.
It certainly did. It was the OG of "no-code" or "low-code".
But like no-code or low-code, the niche in which it's useful to a business is limited. I commonly say that if software (esp FLOSS) serves even only one person well, it's a success. By that criteria, it was massively successfull.
But 27 years later, we are still mostly writing "html" (or jxl, or whatever todays frontendframework has come up with) by "hand". Or writing code that churns out this HTML for us. And not dragging around stuff in Dreamweaver.
Some figma-export will serve niches, some of which I probably cannot imagine even. Prototyping, one-offs, cousin-erik-building-james-craft-brewery-site, etc. But even combined with generative- or transformative AI, it won't serve as the source for UI "code".
If by “people” you mean “developers”, then yes you’re right. But I don’t think anyone else ever really cared.
The problem with Dreamweaver is that you still needed a developer to upload and run the site. And back then, you couldn’t run single page applications (web stacks hadn’t evolved that far yet), so still needed developers to write the backend.
Thus there wasn’t a huge amount to gain in using Dreamweaver for the professional world.
AI has changed that in that it doesn’t have the same limitations as Dreamweaver. However, like yourself, I don’t think we’ll see AI replace developers. Or at least the current crop of LLMs still have a long way to go before they can be used without developer oversight.
Edit: also worth noting that Flash was everywhere back then too. So many web designers opted for Flash instead.
I actually do see developers being replaced by AI. But only certain roles and only after it solves the issues that e.g. Dreamweaver did not solve.
Building stuff from scratch is easy. AI can do it, dreamweaver could, that sweatshop worker on fiverr, newest junior hire, etc.
Maintaining legacy isn't. AI isn't there yet: at most it can replace existing with new, but it cannot "understand" context, history, The Reason Why Kevin Built This Weird Unintelligable Abstraction, or how the three different ways of validating an email are actually a business requirement.
Let alone building stuff that withstands the decay of real constraints and time.
I've been around long enough (30+ years software dev/engineer) to have seen this decay over and over and to know what works and what doesn't (It's a people issue, hardly a technical one).
I've never seen AI, that sweatshop worker on fiverr, newest junior hire, or any low- or no-code tool, amongst which Dreamweaver, churn out something that's easy to change, maintainable for months, years, decades.
There's software that gets a few hours a year of attention and keeps running, securely, performant. That can be picked up, changed or added to and deployed in hours. And there's software that will explode the moment you even glance at the files, let alone anyone fixing, updating, or g*d forbid, adding features to.
AI generated stuff almost exclusively falls in the last category. And we don't have anything AI around yet that can do this fixing, updating, adding features for us.
So currently it successfully replaces many of the code monkeys, fiverr-freelancers and junior devs churning out forever-greenfield-projects. But little else.
Sure, but I’ve seen plenty of senior co-workers deliver a pile of dynamite in Java and get a bonus for it, abandoning it to some other poor sod who will have to fix and maintain it. Managers who reward that behavior will probably be the ones who try to AI Everything, and it’ll probably work for just long enough to make all the devs redundant.
Yea. To be clear. With "senior" I did not mean "developers with over 16 months of experience" but developers that have failed spectacularly, several times, learned from that, and now strive to avoid these, and related mistakes.
A junior can never be that, due to lack of the experience. But too many long-term developers haven't failed, or haven't learned from these mistakes.
For example, about five years ago, I worked a few months with a 40+ years-of-experience software developer, who worked almost his entire life on one single product (in C++ and Java) in one company, solo. I was asked to assess if/how it was possible to get new people for this project because he was retiring. Part of the code was marvelous and a true beauty. Other parts were horrors or inintelligable mess. He truly did not like Java (at first) so a giant part of the java codebase was there to make it look-and-feel somewhat like his (also non-standard) C++.
Ironically, the nice parts were those that were hardly touched or changed - infrastructure, boilerplate, etc. But the worst parts were those that needed frequent changes due to business demands or the ever changing outside world. He honestly never realized that there were patterns and systems (by now), to keep software manageable under real-world-demands and changes. That turned also to be the saving of this project: he loved "DDD" and "Design Patterns" (both he heard about, but never dove into), and implemented some core ideas in this project before handing it over: anti-corruption-layers, ports-adapters, dependency-injection, testing.
Take your current project, then run `figma-cli-ai --fix` and have a modern design.
I guess I'm missing the joke as this doesn't seem to be a thing?
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'll depend on other vendors to make the models who will eat up all the margins
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.
Never underestimate the power of market share. Adobe has had a bunch of competitors but still dominates design.
Speaking of Adobe!
Adobe is going to get absolutely trounced by GenAI. They've got so many competitors coming at them from all angles.
Also, innovation capital (engineers at startups) experience outsized rewards at startups when disruption happens. The better engineers will flock to more nimble outfits and reap the benefits.
Adobe is a dinosaur.
Adobe has been thinking about GenAI longer than you probably have (probably added because this is HN and you never know).
I got to talk to a product engineer about some of their work back in 2021, and he was describing generative (and even generative-editive) capabilities they had in hand that most associate with the last two years, they were just figuring out how to productize them, many of which they have.
I have my own complaints about Adobe products and choices but they are far from out of the game, and they’re probably going to be fine, especially if a lot of people make the mistake of thinking of them primarily as a dinosaur Figma competitor.
Content-aware fill was introduced in 2010
Adobe has SOOO much money though that it will take a giant force to unseat them. Not to say we shouldn’t keep trying (I love Krita) but they have made sure they’re on the top of the totem pole. Complete with spyware on every designers computer.
This. I heard "gimp is free and will kill Adobe within a year or two" from 1997 or so. As much as I hate Adobe's methods it still wins hands down in UX for image editing. So, as a hobbyist, I have no plans to cancel my subscription.
I wish for some real competition in this space, but it will take a LOT of effort to dethrone Adobe. My 2c.
Gimp is an awful app with terrible UX.
Adobe has RunwayML, Midjourney, and a hundred other startups chasing after them.
The number of things you can do without Adobe is increasing every day.
> Gimp is an awful app with terrible UX.
Yes, and it's not clear that those startups will fare better than gimp.
Adobe spends inordinate amount of effort to understand the problems that users are solving and make UX that users love. As the result Adobe has tons of money to improve the product. Users curse its business practices, white an occasional "goodbye Adobe" or "FU" messages but keep buying subscriptions.
The moat around this should not be underestimated. My 2c.
There is no love for Adobe. Those subscriptions are begrudgingly held.
The new breed of tools can already do your Adobe workflow. There simply is nothing for Adobe to add to the table.
Adobe had a huge moat for image and video tools because they were historically very hard to develop. Now it's easy for anyone to models up to a new UX and deliver 90% of the useful surface area of Adobe Photoshop.
Adobe's labyrinth of menus is legacy. That's not how editing of the future will work.
Besides, the number of creators is going to increase by at least an order of magnitude, if not more. Those creators are growing up on new tools. Adobe is stuffy. Someone using CapCut is never going to download Adobe Creative Cloud.
This game is already lost.
> Adobe had a huge moat forimage and video tools because they were historically very hard to develop. ... Adobe's labyrinth of menus is legacy.
I am not sure. I heard the same arguments from the gimp crowd for years. But they always kept talking about solving their own problems (programmatic changing of imagery for web development), not the problems creative, non programmer users had and were willing to pay for solving (interactive manipulation based on visual feedback, which is how many creative types tend to work). They vehemently opposed improvements that were critical for hobbyists and professionals, like insisting on staying with 8-bit colors forever.
As a result, 25+ years later, gimp is a niche tools with its main draw being that it is free. Adobe spent a lot of time understanding workflows of target users.
When I, a pure hobbyist, work on my photos in Photoshop my feeling is immediately "ah, it really does what I want". As much as I hate Adobe business practices I gladly pay their subscription ransom to have Photoshop when I process my travel pictures.
I am not sure the new crowd understands paying users (and not "I will use it for free and watch ads" folks) any better than gimp used to. But I wish them luck. My 2c.
adobe moat is complex desktop software
Figma is a whole lot easier to replace actually you can now actually with a self host OSS that came up with and bring your own api key from antrophic or open ai
What kind of a moat is that? Who says "I want complex desktop software!" ?
entire design industry???? like are you sure that there are people out there works using photoshops,premier,illustrator etc that want more complex tool set???
are you sure that these people don't exist???
talk about arrogant
Not a single person wants more complex tools. They want more capable tools maybe but never ever a more complex on. What is the benefit of increasing complexity except to show off?
Are you in design? How does increasing complexity benefit you personally?
While technically, Figma is just a web app tool. Replacing it would be hard. It has a ton of features, it’s well designed, it exports working wireframe mock ups you can use to demonstrate functionality. It’s good software.
Yeah but a lot less complex than adobe suite
Which complexity in general is not a feature, but a mere bug.
You only says this because you are web(only) dev
*acting like web world is not broken half the time
> It won't just be figma. The market is already filling up with lots of players in this space.
MongoDB wants a word.. another "this will never amount to anything" HN special.
"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
Figma is what all the designers are using. If they turn that into a Claude for design and add the ability to complete the wireframes with AI generated code. There’s no need for engineers until after acquisition. Just maintenance.
The difference here is - Adobe tried using a proprietary stack. Figma can spit React. Everyone knows React - even if you use something else. It’s perfect timing with AI coding agents and every, single, UX team using it.
"Figma is what all the designers are using. If they turn that into a Claude for design and add the ability to complete the wireframes with AI generated code"
You can literally do this NOW without needing figma
Yeah, but I think the point is that designers are already using figma. There’s no mass exodus of designers from figma looking for an AI solution to replace it. So figma has a large paying base to which it can introduce AI generated code (which it has done to some degree already anyway).
like I said earlier, I don't think you need that feature since the only drowback you screenshoot the figma design paste it chatbox and it works
like literally require minimal effort, like do you think this designer so "technology" ill ??? so they need the chatbox and preview page directly into the same page?
> 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?
Couple reasons, spread the risk and increase the possible people to sell to.
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?
One main difference is performance. Penpot becomes unusuably laggy in some situations (like when you use raster images). Penpot made bet on .svg rendered directly using browsers. They thought these engines will become fast enough.
Figma renders everything with webgl in their own engine and has 0 performance issues.
AFAIK penpot is now working on same approach.
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.
https://penpot.app/ is doing pretty well and quite well featured!
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.
That’s been going on for a while with Figma. Their core user base (at least historically core) generally feels neglected, because they’ve been trying to go horizontal with a slew of related products. Meanwhile they’re charging designers to use variables.
Imagine being charged to use variables. Crazy.
Yup, I'll confirm this 100%. I do not like Figma and have 0 trust and optimism about it; I use it because I have to and will ditch it at the first corner, probably for Penpot. When you have trivial-to-fix bug reports with hundreds of comments and votes collecting dust for 3-4 years, you lose all respect from your userbase.
My hope is that at least with Penpot I can submit a PR if I am motivated enough. With Figma, I've done all I can.
The eternal broken printer driver
I’d just settle on Figma supporting features that enforce consistency when designers are working in it.
It has no way of setting for example, designs to always use auto layout.
That’s my frustration with this product
Charging more money for features is not enshittificaton. Making the product worse like adding advertisements would be.
A full professional seat is $16 for individual, $55 for organizations and $90 for enterprises. Either price is a nothing burger for a professional tool.
There are plenty of textbook cases of enshittification that are covered by price increases—just look at Adobe and AutoCAD selling credits that are used just to launch the program. As long as it fits with the "claw back value from your customers and partners to feed your investors" pattern, ∂shit > 0.
Adobe has always been targetted at profressionals price wise. Making it SaaS made pirating harder and the high monthly price (and annoying dark patterns) excluded and alienated the general public which upset people who decided to pay for it for the first time in their life. The problem there is mostly the lack of good competition in spaces like Lightroom but that's starting to change. The everyone-pirates-photoshop so don't bother trying to compete idea is now over.
They're alienating plenty of paying customers as well. Many people will not pay to rent software, and I expect that number will increase as the number of companies trying to collect rent on software increases. Because $10/month (let alone whatever adobe is trying to charge) never sounds like a lot, but multiply by the number of pieces of software (let alone some non-software flirting with the same gimmick) you regularly use and it quickly becomes absurd.
A secondary issue is that rent-a-software stuff is driven by pea counters and they'll never be able to resist constantly raising the price once they can increase revenue x% with an action that, in the short term, will probably result in absolutely no decline in users. Of course in the longer term they're setting the stage for their own disruption, obsolescence, and revenue trending to $0.
I also expect this whole business model will be heavily regulated in the future, because what percent of recurring revenue, especially on things like mobile, is from people who simply forget to cancel or were not aware it was recurring in the first place?
It’s not just software rental. Every online shop or service is turning towards revenue extraction by targeted pricing: Services that look at your IRS records or other public clues, and hop, you train travel, Amazon listing, car repairs are billed higher, exactly at your purchasing power.
Yesterday there was an article saying an AI is used to infer the “right pricing for you”, and suspected it used variables such as your skin color, gender, job and location, probably discriminatory but mangled in a big AI engine.
In fact, I’d sell a REST API for adaptive pricing to mum & pop shops if I had time.
> upset people who decided to pay for it for the first time in their life
It also upset paying customers. It's no longer possible to _own_ Adobe software, and so I don't anymore. Up until just a couple years ago I was still using the copy of Photoshop CS4 I paid for (as part of the Master Collection CS4, Student Edition) in 2008.
A monthly subscription is a complete non-starter for me.
You never owned any Adobe product, you licensed it. And that license could be revoked at any time; while it is unlikely Adobe would go after an individual, the license that you agree to allows them to do so.
Adobe can say whatever they want in their EULA; whether it's legally enforceable in court is another matter.
Imagine how these you-own-a-license-not-the-thing-itself shenanigans would play out for any other product we purchase. "No, you didn't buy that $40k car in cash upfront! You only bought Toyota's permission to operate the car, and we reserve the right to repossess it at any time."
reminds me of the teslas that got downgraded because the new owners only paid for the cheaper subscription
I’m not sure what the cheaper subscription you’re referring to is.
Only “Premium Connectivity” aka the internet data plan (streaming media, live traffic, and live sentry video feeds) is exclusively a subscription.
Tesla has always offered the option purchase the Full Self Driving upgrade outright. The option to subscribe monthly to FSD was added later.
Maybe you’re thinking of the free trial of FSD that new vehicles come with?
There is a lot of criticize Tesla for, but they aren’t locking features behind subscriptions.
In the past, BMW has locked heated seats, wireless Apple CarPlay, even software updates behind their ConnectedDrive subscription.
first page result for "reminds me of the teslas that got downgraded because the new owners only paid for the cheaper subscription".
https://electrek.co/2022/07/26/tesla-ransom-customer-over-80...
> Tesla used to sell Model S vehicles with software-locked battery packs. This was a way to offer different range options without having to make production more complicated with different battery pack sizes.
> Later, Tesla started to offer owners of those software-locked vehicles the option to unlock the capacity for an additional cost. Tesla phased out the practice over the years, but the company still used software-locked battery packs when doing warranty replacements of battery packs of certain capacities that it doesn’t produce anymore.
Upgrading the head unit for a 2013 Model S triggered an error and reverted this old generation battery to software lock.
This clearly was a software bug and Tesla reverted it for all customers using these older batteries.
This has literally nothing to do with subscriptions (the word subscribe isn’t even in the article once). I don’t even think you read the article.
> Car is sold twice since, and now has a new owner (my customer). It says 90, badged 90, has 90-type range.
> He has the car for a few months, goes in and does a paid MCU2 upgrade at Tesla after the 3G shutdown.
> ...
> Tesla told him that he had to pay $4,500 to unlock the capability:
It's all in the article.
You can get all stuck-up about the word "subscription" but guy goes into Tesla for a non-battery related service and loses 2/3 thirds of the range the car claimed it had unless he forks over 5k.
Well the problem with Adobe is that some of the really crucial tools are essentialy abandoned.
InDesing for example is used for every printed book, magazine, packaging, poster… ever. Industry standard with insane amount of users.
Yet InDesign basically didn’t change since CS6. It got some mostly minor features but that is like 12 years of nothing. The app also got more unstable and only thing they work on is making their fileformat incompatible with prior versions.
That means paying 50+ usd month for licensing a software that hates you but you are required to have it. Perfect monopoly capture.
I looked up adobe credits. Aren’t they just used to buy licensed assets like pictures and videos. But not for the core app?
From a financial point of view I think Adobe’s enshittification is working pretty well.
I 'member Adobe's Creative Suite costing hundreds of dollars. Photoshop alone clocked in at 699$, the full CS6 was 2599$ [1]. Either you were a professional and paid dearly every odd year or you were a student and used a cracked/keygen'd CS6.
Today? The full CC license is 70$ a month for individuals (30$ for students) and 100$ a month for businesses. Despite inflation, assuming a two year upgrade cycle you still get the same price for the full Adobe package when comparing CS vs CC.
One may complain a lot about Adobe (RIP Flash, and anything Gen AI can go to hell for all I care), but "enshittification" is one thing that can't reasonably be thrown at them.
As for Adobe Credits, AFAIK that's credits for fonts and assets - and again, I vastly prefer dealing with one storefront (Adobe) than having to buy and license individual font files or stock photos.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2012/4/23/2968192/adobe-cs6-pricing...
You just successfully rationalized the exact tactic that Adobe sales team pitched to their leadership: That most users will pay the monthly subscription because the math “evens out.”
Very very very few people have a legitimate need to upgrade Adobe product versions every 2 years.
> Very very very few people have a legitimate need to upgrade Adobe product versions every 2 years.
I suspect that most, even a lot of professional users, could get along just fine with CS1 or CS2. The core functionality hasn’t changed all that much and in a lot of ways, CS/CC apps have gotten worse. The only reason these individuals aren't still using those old versions is because they aren’t well suited for modern machines.
I’d personally be elated if Adobe started selling a lightly modernized single-purchase Photoshop CS1, even if it cost what single purchase PS licenses used to. The lack of cruft and UI churn alone would be worth it before even getting into the savings compared to a subscription.
The existence proof that people are paying the subscription price when there are other tools out there. Do people must think there is a need for it
There are other tools out there; I use Affinity Photo myself.
There are no other workflows that 100% match Adobe Photoshop. Until you like-for-like replicate the workflow, professionals will continue to use PS.
As a hobbyist, I owned CS4 (purchased on sale) and kept using it for ages. Turning it into a subscription might be fine for bleeding edge professionals who care about whatever new bells and whistles every year to finish a job 2% faster, but the ongoing costs cut out anybody who isn’t making money with it.
Thankfully there are better competitors like Affinity in that space now.
RIP Macromedia Fireworks though.
It's enshittification because most people don't need the 2 year upgrade cycle. For most individuals and small businesses, it was more like buy once and use forever.
A majority or at least large minority of Adobe users were/are on Macs.
The Mac version has lived through 68K MacOS pre and post System 7, PPC Mac pre and post OS X, x86 Macs pre and post Carbon support and now ARM Macs. After each transition , there was a limited amount of time that you could use the same version and even a smaller amount of time that you would have wanted to.
But the same argument applies that applies to Figma. It’s a professional tool that should help you generate income far greater than the cost
S-1 SEC file here: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025...
Well it looks like I missed the boat. Current price $137.
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.
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?
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).
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.
$19.8 billion market cap to save everyone from doing research
Entshittification incoming August 1 then?
It may take a bit longer than that, but don't worry, it will happen eventually.
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...
That was quite fast - they filed an S1 in the beginning of July...
Is that a bad thing?
Congratulations to Dylan and Evan and everyone who built this company.
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.
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"
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.
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..?
How many months do we have to migrate until complete enshittification? Can we realistically expect like 6 more months of life?
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!
Can't wait for "increasing shareholder value" to run it into the ground.
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.
The first trade price and not the IPO price? That's likely because the IPO is so over subscribed it's likely to pop 40-50% on it's first trade.
If you're talking about the IPO price, I think that's unlikely without some exogenous event.
how strongly do you believe that prediction? Strongly enough to short?
I won't short. I will buy a dip (like I did with NET and PLTR). It will turn positive for me while EPS is still <1
I might sell call spreads on it if implied vol is rich enough
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.
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!
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
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.
> 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)?
Why do many people not understand this? It's bloated. And doesn't do it's core competency (hint UI/UX design) well.
[flagged]
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?
[flagged]
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.