Comment by rgifford | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rgifford | Hacker News Reader

I'm an engineer, so presumably not the intended audience wrt Figma. I hate it. Hopefully changes to the free tier curtail adoption. Three big reasons:

- It's built around an un-cropped 2d view. Cute-sie and unique, I know. But sending teammates links in an un-cropped 2d expanse is hit or miss. All us working in it don't know where/what one another are referring to. We've taken to slacking screenshots and pretending it doesn't exist.

- It feels super heavy weight. Load the page and look at the network requests. It's seconds just to get a menu of projects. Jumping into a project takes just as long. I assume this has to do with them trying to do a bunch of collaboration stuff that's already done by better, more established products. Why is ms paint so complicated?

- It's super clumsy to search. For comparison look at storybooks -- searchable, cropped, focused on compose-able components. Very, very simple UI. I spend minutes hunting around Figma for a random design I need to attach to a PR description when I know the name of the component I'm looking for!

It's great to see that I'm not the only one with this opinion. As an engineer who consumed design work from figma, I hate it.

* Slow is an understatement. And huge. Like 100Mb to start working on a medium size design (~20 frames?)

* It's impossible to figure out what part of the design to code to. Like you said, the best way we figured out how to work is to take screenshots and export them.

* It's impossible to follow comments. We just take conversations to slack.

* There's no easy way to track design revisions. What's changed? Who knows?

I miss working with designers who use sketch. Even better, those who just send me a full versioned spec that I can review offline. Design changed? Just send me an updated spec? Figma design changed? I have no idea where to even start looking.

Was considering Figma for a new project. But now that it doesn't have any version history, don't think will try it

Has version history, not sure what commenter talking about.

I wish my company would go back to Figma. Revisions are a nightmare; our project is young and designers change designs without ever notifying software engineers

Designers love it for some reason but as an engineer it's a pain in the ass

> Slow is an understatement. And huge. Like 100Mb to start working on a medium size design (~20 frames?)

Because they need to load the entire editor into the page. Compare that to Sketch, or Photoshop, or any other tool.

I second these points. I actually complained to our Head of UX about it a couple of weeks back.

I get a Figma link and it's generally to a massively zoomed out view of the whole canvas with a ton of different workflows/screenshots spread out on it. It's often very hard to know where to start, and when you zoom in its far too easy to find yourself in the middle of empty space with no clear idea where you are in relation to any of the designs.

Our designers seem to like it but I am not a fan because it's really ####ing hard for non-designers to collaborate with designers, provide feedback, etc.

I'm coming to this conversation late, but your pain points are almost exactly the same ones that inspired a side project of mine [1].

I'd love to hear of any more issues you have with Figma or your workflow in general.

What I'm working on is a web app that serves your project's Figma designs to a focused workspace where you can code them up. Different breakpoints, states, and specs are all right there, so there's no window switching and you never have to open Figma. And it notifies you of design updates.

Still a work in progress, but I hope to launch it later this year.

[1] https://wipkit.com/

What I want is something like figma that is better abstracted for making scalable web designs and outputting better code - for instance figma has auto layouts which are nice, but the output css can just be a rule on the parent class that makes equal margins for all children, instead of the weird absolutely positioned css that comes out.

I don’t build web apps that just absolutely position everything on the page, there’s a document flow and I want my design app to express individual elements based on the relationships between them, not arbitrary drag and drop.

Yea it’s a useful tool but the UI gets super slow for larger projects. And I dread opening Figma files now with my Comcast data cap.

One project I had read access to was ca. 100MB as PDF export. Neither Figma nor evince could render this project well without eating up GBs of RAM.

FYI, you can link to specific frames (screens) into a Figma project. (Share button -> "Link to selected frame" checkbox).

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