Why Figma Is Special(staysaasy.com)

59 pointsby _njuy4 tahun yang lalu48 comments

https://staysaasy.com/product/2022/09/16/why-figma-is-special.html

50 comments

nbzso4 tahun yang lalu

What is special about Figma? Collaboration. Community. Nothing more.

They started as an Illustrator clone, than moved to copy Sketch functionality.

Then COVID happened. Check the stats. A lot of teams before that used it because it was free.

My company workflow used a mix of Sketch and our own DS/Library management solution. Sketch literally committed a suicide by not providing collaboration functionality.

Browser hype is all good, but you have a memory limitation. And nothing beats a native app responsiveness.

I skipped Figma for another reason: It is cloud only app. Yes you can save a file for backup, but you cannot edit or view your work.

I have witnessed the demise of my favorite tool Fireworks in the hands of Adobe. In one point in time we used Inkscape which is working with SVG by default. I can open my designs from 2008 without any problem.

UI/UX designers are waiting for a tool like Blender to emerge and liberate them for falling again into another trap.

Let's hope that after this fiasco the solution will finally emerge.

mvladic4 tahun yang lalu

> Browser hype is all good, but you have a memory limitation. And nothing beats a native app responsiveness.

I learned from the other HN comment that Figma is faster then Adobe XD (probably written in C++ as other Adobe software). Actually, Figma is also written in C++ then compiled with Emscripten to WASM, so it can run in the browser. Also, they skip DOM/SVG/Canvas 2D and use WebGL for fast rendering.

kehrin4 tahun yang lalu

> What is special about Figma? Collaboration. Community. Nothing more.

Wrong: UX. Figma is way more intuitive to use because they had a blank slate when it came to the UI. The competition is stuck with gluing on new features, on an already multi-decade old tool.

nbzso4 tahun yang lalu

>The competition is stuck with gluing on new features, on an already multi-decade old tool.

Wrong: 1000 + Figma plugins add functionality/new features for free. The Sketch UX is not so different.

kehrin4 tahun yang lalu

And? Those are additional features. The core is still light, easy and discoverable. All words that can't be said about Illustrator, Photoshop or InDesign.

[deleted]4 tahun yang lalu

skhameneh4 tahun yang lalu

> What is special about Figma? Collaboration. Community. Nothing more.

I disagree, I first heard about figma while browsing cutting edge WASM/WebGL work, not through any product channels. I found Figma through discovering their CTO's impressive work. Some of this work dates back nearly a decade. https://github.com/evanw?tab=repositories https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...

nbzso4 tahun yang lalu

I don't comment on the technical implementation. I comment on primary UX objectives of the product.

Obviously they pushed hard and have the monetary "award". But from a performance point of view you cannot compete with a native app.

To quote Figma support: This is a browser limitation - every browser has its own active memory limit, but in general, it’s around 2 GB.

Figma serves both the web app and the desktop app via a browser, so these limitations apply when using the Figma desktop app too.

manmal4 tahun yang lalu

The only real limitation I see for Figma (4GB memory Limit due to 32bit address space in WASM) will go away eventually.

nbzso4 tahun yang lalu

Yep. I am sure about this. But I like something that is fast and responsive and can use my extreme amount of RAM available.

But we know how things are. The designer rage will fade away eventually and things will be the same.:) Designers are an emotional bunch, but they have a habit to forget quickly.

samstave4 tahun yang lalu

YO

I did some of my best fn work in inkscape....

Fuck adobe (and the fact they are on WOZ WAY, ironically)

but if blender (community) set out to make a dope ass SVG illustrator clone with the good tooling that Blender is... Adobe would be fucked.

GIMPs cool - but inkscape needs the UI/UX folks of blender to put their lens on it.

I love inkscape - but their UX needs some love I cannot give it, but the blender community can...

paulgb4 tahun yang lalu

Re. Figma's tech moat, Figma has a solid engineering blog that will probably interest folks here because they've had to invent new approaches. Here's some of my favorites:

https://www.figma.com/blog/rust-in-production-at-figma/

https://www.figma.com/blog/multiplayer-editing-in-figma/

https://www.figma.com/blog/realtime-editing-of-ordered-seque...

https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...

candiodari4 tahun yang lalu

Thank you for this link. All the blogs always talk about "leadership", "design", "team management" and the like. This people do, despite saying in the last part of the article that figma's strength is a well-performing c++/rust webassembly+webgl backend.

Let's get some details on what mattered here.

joeycodes4 tahun yang lalu

Having worked on the performance bits of that code base, I always appreciated that the well-performing parts wouldn't have happened without leadership setting explicit performance goals and allocating resources to pay for monitoring and much engineering time to reach said goals.

candiodari4 tahun yang lalu

If you worked on it ... is there some doc describing the general architecture? It looks like the "frontend" is typescript + c++ and the backend is ... perhaps rust, with rust being a sort of "document server". Like: one instance of the backend code manages one savefile, for potentially many clients that then see eachother's changes.

How does webassembly <> backend communication work? I imagine it's somehow websockets. How do you proxy websocket connections to the appropriate backend? How does the C++ <> rust communication work? Protobuf perhaps?

paulgb4 tahun yang lalu

> How does webassembly <> backend communication work? I imagine it's somehow websockets. How do you proxy websocket connections to the appropriate backend?

I don't think there's much public info about this, besides what you can infer from looking at what goes over the wire (zstd-encoded binary messages). But to your question about routing wss connections to the appropriate backend, we've been working on a proxy/DNS server that does just that (by giving each backend its own ephemeral hostname). We've talked to some Figma engineers and at least on a conceptual level they do something similar (although their routing is path-based rather than DNS-based).

Our source is here if you're interested: https://github.com/drifting-in-space/spawner

naillo4 tahun yang lalu

I wonder how much of that is usable though if the core engineering team disapears after this and some adobe team is stuck having to sift through it (to understand and way later be able to add to it).

stevenfabre4 tahun yang lalu

We learned so much from Figma at Liveblocks. We spent the last 2 years rebuilding a lot of those core concepts as APIs any developers can use to make their own product multiplayer.

If you're interested in more technical articles related to the topic, I think you'll enjoy those two:

- https://liveblocks.io/blog/how-to-animate-multiplayer-cursor...

- https://liveblocks.io/blog/how-to-build-undo-redo-in-a-multi...

josefrichter4 tahun yang lalu

Although Adobe covers a broad portfolio of design professions, it seems like UI & interaction design is also quite important, given this acquisition. Figma owns like 99% of this market, nobody uses anything else.

I was one of those who stayed with Sketch quite long, but then also jumped the ship. Mainly because of Figma's fascinating performance (Sketch is super slow) and much better prototyping features.

But I think Adobe also sees that Figma folks are the true masters in WebAssembly front ends. Maybe one of the best on this planet. I cannot think of any other WASM project being so good and so dominant in the market.

Anyway, I do share the pessimism of the design community. For us it's a disaster, comparable only to Adobe acquiring Macromedia back in the day, followed by messing up or killing all of its great products.

jethronethro4 tahun yang lalu

>Anyway, I do share the pessimism of the design community. For us it's a disaster, comparable only to Adobe acquiring Macromedia back in the day, followed by messing up or killing all of its great products.

But the design community adapted. Just like the technical communication community adapted when Adobe bought Framemaker and RoboHelp. The pain's going to be short term while that community finds an alternative. But, if history is anything to go by, an alternative that community will find.

nbzso4 tahun yang lalu

Check the new Sketch versions. They have moved forward. The app is snappy and you have browser integration for comments and handoff. Using one app for all your design needs in my personal view is limiting.

There are a lot of prototyping tools : Framer. Marvel. Proto.io. Principle.

Basically the safest bet always is to follow the old wisdom: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.:)

josefrichter4 tahun yang lalu

The day I'll need to check Sketch again will come, I'm afraid.

No worries about my eggs - I do use Framer, Proto.io and tons of others. Mostly because each of them is missing something :-)

nbzso4 tahun yang lalu

> I do use Framer, Proto.io and tons of others. Mostly because each of them is missing something.

Yep. I wholeheartedly agree with this statement.:)

dabedee4 tahun yang lalu

It's of course understandstable that the founding team would take the exit. The fact that they have the strongest & most technologically advanced product, loved universally by designers and software engineers alike, only makes it more devastating.

belter4 tahun yang lalu

Add to that, the devastation of Adobe shareholders, who paid $20B for a non profitable company. Whose team will quickly dismantle, as soon as their required retention periods expire. Maybe with a few lost on the comfort of Adobe senior management bureaucracy.

nytesky4 tahun yang lalu

So Figma is still not making a profit? It’s funny how so many acquisitions focus on revenue, which feels less useful without costs to acquire revenue (see $2 for $1 examples abound).

Adobe is down $40B in market cap. Some of that maybe to related to overall market weakness like FedEx and inflation, but it feels like shareholders value Figma at $0 and that this is a $20B write down??

diceduckmonk4 tahun yang lalu

> loved universally by designers and software engineers

Not really. I’m an engineer and worked closely with designers for the bulk of my career. I’ve been spoiled with much better communication processes and mediums. I’ve shipped UI widgets to core libraries of Amazon and Google, none of it needed Figma.

The Figma product itself is slow, and has usability issues, which is ironic. The CSS box model, for example, is a 90% approximation. It is an improvement over Sketch, but these tools when viewed as a designer/engineer communication medium is not a necessity. Designers would also be fine in not web adapted tools. I’ve found Storybook to be a much better protocol to match impedance between design and engineering, but that requires an org with UX developers (a designer who can produce working CSS and HTML).

jorams4 tahun yang lalu

> Designers are not like engineering or marketing teams that love hopping to the sexy new product. Design products are complicated; it isn’t “fun” to try out a new vector graphics editor. It is weird that all designers suddenly wanted to move to Figma. It would be like half the world’s sales teams quit using Salesforce overnight.

They may not necessarily like moving to another vector graphics editor, but many can move relatively easily. The hardest part is adjusting your workflow. Salesforce-based sales teams build up and rely on a large amount of data that is hard to migrate and ever-changing. Many designers could just try Figma for their next design, without affecting other projects.

happytoexplain4 tahun yang lalu

There is definitely more to it though - I've tried every design app and have bounced off of them all. Figma clicked instantly. I know it's a cliche, but I have never experienced "it just works" until I designed our most recent mobile app in Figma.

danielunited4 tahun yang lalu

What’s with the obsession for Figma? It’s a nice product, but chill. People have been spamming it like crazy the past 3 days

Wowfunhappy4 tahun yang lalu

It's because Figma was just bought by Adobe for a $20,000,000,000.

[deleted]4 tahun yang lalu

leetrout4 tahun yang lalu

Because history has shown us it is likely game over for what we have enjoyed and rely on now that it's going to Adobe.

sofixa4 tahun yang lalu

It's a good product people really liked, which was acquired by a competitor, and will probably be destroyed by them. Imagine SQLite being acquired (i know it's not a product, imagine) by Oracle. Something you liked and used often is going to become a dumpster fire soon, why wouldn't you talk about it?

williamstein4 tahun yang lalu

I remember when Oracle acquired MySQL.

tarkin24 tahun yang lalu

Am the only one who /dislikes/ figma because of its horrific performance? It's a design app and yet it seems to take up more RAM and CPU power than most games and, frankly, much more complex apps.

If Adobe buries Figma and a competitor comes about that can make a responsive application that takes an /appropriate/ amount of RAM and processing power I'd be over the moon.

hazelnut-tree4 tahun yang lalu

Adobe's UI design app 'Adobe XD' is one of the few Adobe apps to trail behind their competitors: Sketch and Figma.

Figma is also much more than just a UI design tool. You can create virtual whiteboards, brainstorm sessions and virtual classrooms - far ahead in collaboration features compared to Adobe XD and Sketch. Figma is even encroaching on the territory of apps like 'Miro' (a popular online collaborative whiteboard tool).

Adobe also has single Adobe ID sign-on for their products. I assume Adobe ID will integrate into Figma as some time in future. Will they force Figma users to switch to Adobe IDs?

Adobe's plan for Figma shows if you can't beat a rival, you buy the competition.

(An aside: 'Procreate' on the iPad is a digital painting app where, once again, Adobe is chasing the competition with their own digital painting app called 'Fresco'. Adobe's app has failed to dent Procreate's massive popularity.)

longtimelistnr4 tahun yang lalu

Interesting you mention Miro because this is the first time I’ve heard them come up in the figma discussion.

Personally I think Miro can give them a run for their money and create a competitor on top of their existing product (if they choose too). Because the Miro collaboration is identical to figma with the only difference being Miro isn’t targeting product design. Their web app is just as smooth as figma and I could totally see them building out their offering to compete.

kranke1554 tahun yang lalu

Few Adobe apps? Working in the video/media creation space, here is the current status of the apps that I use:

Photoshop - slow. New desirable features (for the artists using it) come once every 2/3 years. Now tries to cloud save even when you don’t want it to.

Competitors: Affinity Photo

Outlook: many if not most photo only users I know of have moved on from Adobe products. Seems to be mostly used in the photo retouching and editing industry.

Adobe Premiere - slow. Unusable for anything longer than 10-30 minutes in length. Anything longer is by rule done in AVID instead. Extremely prone to crashes. Buggy. Some tools have decreased in quality (ie type tool). Overall customer satisfaction is from my experience low. Live Link, the ability to have a linked media between Premiere and After Effects, is so unreliable that I would only expect its use by first year video editors. Anything beyond that I would question that individuals intelligence.

Competitors: Final Cut X, Davinci Resolve, AVID

Outlook: Although Avid dominates in long form, Premiere should remain in place for shorter material - music videos, advertising and corporate video. Resolve is getting better but UI is heavily opinionated which turns some people off. Final Cut was given up on by the industry (unfairly in my view) due to botched launch. FCPX is however in my view a far superior product.

Adobe After Effects: incredibly slow. Similar to photoshop has a low cadence of desirable features - particularly for one of the core user bases - 2D Motion designers - for whom features requested 10 years ago are still not coming. Adobe relies on plugin makers extending its functionality and making it useful.

Competitors: NUKE and Cavalry

Outlook: NUKE, once considered the slowest renderer on the planet, is now faster than after effects since they’ve slowly converted the tools to GPU.

Cavalry is still a young software. UI/UX is so radically different from After effects however it’s hard to see people make the switch.

The link with Illustrator is what keeps after effects unassailable. For now.

Adobe general outlook: in the creative communities im a part of, Adobe is widely regarded as a useless leeching company that’s locked away decades of solid software development (done in the distant past) behind a subscription wall. In the last 10 years they have failed to innovate in any significant aspect. Actually important updates that help folks get work done are a really rare occurrence. Overall the general view of Adobe products is that they are bad and getting worse. There’s constant talk about alternatives and how to avoid Adobe products in the pipeline if possible.

hazelnut-tree4 tahun yang lalu

I also dislike Adobe and many of their products. But my impression is the majority of Adobe apps continue to dominate their market sectors.

I use the Affinity apps (Designer, Photo and Publisher) but even Affinity have made little dent on equivalent Adobe apps. However, Affinity have carved out a slice of the market with apps that are successful, profitable, and no subscription.

kranke1554 tahun yang lalu

Ah got it. I assumed you meant that Adobe XD trailed it’s competitors in features and quality.

Now I understand you mean in market share. Yes that’s true but I wonder how shaky this is considering the increasingly poor foundations. This sort of thing starts slowly then it all collapses in a wave (the same way Figma exploded in usage).

Autodesk was considered unassailable and now I know studios try to avoid working with their software more and more. In many areas - modelling for games in particular - 3ds Max has fallen off in favor of other apps like Blender. In motion Design Cinema 4D has taken over. It can happen.

kranke1554 tahun yang lalu

It’s a shame. Does anyone think Adobe will carry on the front end work that made Figma so good? Or will they just let the tech stack rot and die like every other product they own.

drcongo4 tahun yang lalu

I despise Figma, so for the first time ever I'm really excited for an Adobe takeover because the sooner this app dies the better. Having Figma open in a single browser tab on an Intel MBP will burn a hole through to the centre of the earth. The "desktop" Figma is a janky, laggy mess that opens in a tiny window every time and eats resources like nothing else. Copy and paste between Figma and almost anything else is horribly unpredictable.

ejb9994 tahun yang lalu

That has been my experience as well - really don't understand the love for it, I run on a very powerful machine with 1GB fiber internet, and it always, always feels like a dog to me whenever I am forced to use it.

Not sure Adobe will make it any better, but just don't see why it is so popular in the first place.

0x70d4 tahun yang lalu

Also had a bad experience with managing fonts on Linux because of its web-based architecture. All in all using Sketch as a single user was a smooth and straightforward experience, wehreas using Figma was an extremely frustrating one. I'm pessimistic about Adobe being able to make it any better.

sanitycheck4 tahun yang lalu

Same - whenever I get a Figma link I open a whole new browser because within a few minutes I know it's going to crash and I have a limited time to veeerry slooowly try to extract the information I need. This is on multiple machines, i7, 32gb RAM, good enough GPU to run modern games.

saos4 tahun yang lalu

> Designers are not like engineering or marketing teams that love hopping to the sexy new product

Little chuckle at this as someone working in marketing technology space

I'm surprised by the valuation myself. I wonder if a company like Microsoft or Apple was ciricling Figma for an acquisition. That sort of competition would certainly rattle imo an uninspiring Adobe.

I'm stil dissappointed by the acquistion... to the point I shed a tear. I really dislike Adobe. But, I'm positive something new will appear.

Maybe a company like Apple should acquire Sketch, pump some money into and go head to head with Figma Adobe. I didn't mind Sketch tbh

hackitup74 tahun yang lalu

(I'm the OP)

My Occam's razor guess is that they just didn't want to sell, and they could've remained independent via IPO so the price had to be very high to get it done. Another huge offer would be sufficient but not necessary to drive this valuation, Figma was a beast of a company independently.

michaelsalim4 tahun yang lalu

To me, Figma is a as big as it is because it's a good product that is accessible.

Sketch only runs on Mac, GIMP is a completion for Photoshop, Illustrator comes with a hefty price tag. I've tried others like Inkscape/Krita but either the UI are complicated, or my installs keep breaking for no reason.

Meanwhile you can open Figma everywhere(even though sometimes buggy - but a refresh fixes it most of the time). It's performant enough. And its UI/UX is simple enough that most people can get around relatively quickly. Not to mention its free tier.

smallerfish4 tahun yang lalu

As the recipient of designs on the engineering side, I've never liked Figma. I don't have a touchpad or a scrollwheel on my mouse, so the scroll UX is hostile. I think there's definitely still room to find a middle ground between Figma and Invision.