Comment by jonshariat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonshariat | Hacker News Reader

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For those curious about the hype behind figma, here are the reasons why teams are moving to it:

1. No versioning needed. For designers versioning has been a huge pain, some git like tools have popped up but with Figma none is needed. Changes made by multiple parties are always in sync since they are made live in the same doc. Plus always on versioning.

2. All in one tool. Currently designers use sketch(create designs), Invision (prototype and get feedback, and Zeplin (hand off to dev). Thats 3 different places to manage, no source of truth. With Figma its all in one package.

3. Cheap. Free for teams of 2 designers, viewers are always free. You done need to pay for the above tools I mentioned.

4. Strong foundation for plugins and community. They way the figma team have built the product allows for rich plugins and community.

Design version control has actually been a big win for our design team and the handoff to engineering. We use Sketch + Abstract to do this. WIP projects live in separate branches that we can share out to get feedback. Once the design is locked in for that milestone, we push to Master and hand that off to engineering where they can inspect the mocks right in Abstract.

We don’t mind using multiple tools if they’re all really good at what they do. Our core toolkit includes Sketch, Abstract, and Marvel. Sketch Cloud has supported prototyping and commenting for a while now, but Marvel is a bit more robust.

Obviously each team has their own needs, but this has worked for us.

I liked Abstract's rigor in keeping things in order but it also added a lot of overhead of commit, write, merge, etc.

Also the biggest hurdle I had with Abstract was no layer level diffing/conflicts. I know they were working on it though.

Figma allows us to move a lot faster but you do lose some of that workflow rigor that something like abstract forces you into. Like you said different teams with different needs.However, looking ahead in the next 5 years, sketch is going to have a hard time staying relevant imho.

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