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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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)
Also you don't really have proper version control, and what little you have isn't integrated with the rest of your project.
Also replying to this re Sketch, especially it being a business choice for them, Sketch is a Mac app through-and-through. That entire application would never in a million years have existed were it not for being Mac only. Sketch leveraged the Mac specific APIs created by Apple in the 2000s (e.g., Core Image and Core Graphics), this is exactly why Sketch was able to innovate on the UI-side (whereas Figma pretty much took Sketch's UI innovations wholesale, as pointed out several times in this comments section), because they didn't need the technical depth that Figma had, which had to re-implement all the low-level graphics APIs themselves in order to be cross-platform (Figma is not exactly a web-only app, it runs on at least Mac native as well, I don't have a source for this but I've heard it a few times [and I don't mean the separate app download Figma makes available, which is just a web wrapper, but there's a real Mac-native internal-only version of Sketch that's used for development]).
This is why for example Sketch was able to launch a compelling product with, I think two full-time employees(?) when it initially launched, that was competitive with Adobe products. This purely a product of the Apple ecosystem and specifically the climate in the 2000s when Apple was still pushing desktop-first technologies like high-quality image and vector libraries. Note also that Sketch didn't take funding until 2019 (and only then because Figma forced their hand), whereas Figma were VC-funded from effectively day one (Field was a Thiel fellow in 2012, first funding round in 2013).
There's two patterns here that were happening during the 2000s, one is bootstrapped Mac-first applications were often quite successful. Two, applications were using the AppKit to quickly iterate on interesting UI innovations, the fuzzy finder (LaunchBar, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaunchBar), the entire native-app-with-an-API-backend (Watson, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson), the extension-based editor (TextMate, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextMate), are some other examples of this.
I, 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.
Canva (which is a tool ACTUAL non-tech people care about) proved that years ago
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.
It runs impressively well for a web app, but I still get multi-second freezes all the time on high-end hardware.
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.
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.
> …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.)
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.
Sketch were nice and comfy and said NO to everything.
When you are coming into an established space, it must feel real good to have a competitor like that who gives away the full market to you kindly!
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.
Just look at FB, GitHub, LinkedIn, etc…
https://madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-design-...
https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-... (old but interesting still)
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.
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.
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
But most important:
It was free.
You could also get a constraints plugin for Sketch. That’s built-in on Figma.
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.
It's funny how the successes and failures of these two companies ultimately comes down to a single architectural decision that both took different paths on. Sketch's biggest drawback (even back in the 2010's when they were on top) was always that they didn't support Web, Windows or Linux and focused only on Mac's. Honestly it paved the way for Figma to just come up and eat their lunch.
The biggest mistake that Sketch made was not realizing there was a sea change sooner and shifting their focus to a web based app or even releasing Windows and Linux clients. Even now I went to their website and they only offer basic viewing tools on the web, if you want to create with Sketch you need a Mac and there's no way around that.
I loved that tool
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
[0] https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1075741140914731351/s...
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.
You’ll be able to go from figma to production in weeks.
AI tools are still just that tools - they're not abstraction layers from "intent" to "production product".
There may be no moats. Just distribution winners.
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
[1]: https://penpot.app/
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.
The technical term is enshittification.
Can someone explain the advantage of simultaneously having these four massive companies as book runners?
I don't think they can afford to be a follower on AI but being a leader will also be untenable.
We are in a bubble.
Now, the enshittification, price increases and lock-in begins when they ring the opening bell to list on the NYSE.
What an incredible journey!
is this happening with most ipos? what green flags should we look at as hits that "this company is different"?
The only possible green flag os "Did not ipo"
it's sustainable if it doesn't need growth (and market beating growth at that). that would be a green flag.
it's a sad reality, I wish we've found the cure already, or perhaps nothing is broken and I just have to zoom out (for ex., smaller bow-and-arrow players now have a chance to take down the nerfed mastodon)
Congrats to Figma on building well the first time though! The deliberately craft thought out web architecture made a difference!
Edit: I said IPO but I meant first tick.
Edit (1 hour later): I was allocated 2 shares @ $33. My request was for 100 shares, fwiw.
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.
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 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.
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.
There's a "follow me" feature to see what other users are doing. It's been around for several years.
Isn’t the growth proof that those products ARE what people want (whether or not they ask for it)?
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.
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.
