Why Figma Wins (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Why Figma Wins (2020)

kwokchain.com

61 pointsconanxin64 comments

It doesn't win for me. I needed some kind of vector program just to create a logo so I used it. I had to download the desktop version because that was the only way to access the fonts installed on my computer. I then uninstalled it after a while because I only needed it for that one thing. After a few months I look at my running processes and see some figma thing running in the background that was never uninstalled. That is enough for me to never use it again. I hate all of these online social "free" things now. I just buy real programs that I can keep and don't connect to my friends list or whatever a hybrid social network / work tool does.

I think that is the problem.

The common use case is mostly what you describe (a single user working on an isolated drawing) but the social features is what makes it sexy and what enables the company to raise money at spiraling valuations.

> The common use case is

Citation needed. A lot of (most?) design work happens in cooperation with others (clients, teammates).

Repasting couple of comments from previous posts around Figma. They need to be repeated..

- Love Figma! However, their enterprise licence is $45/month ($540 annually)! That is ludicrous for the functionality that the app provides.

- Figma is a closed eco system. You cannot export the files and open them in other app for editing. Sketch is open, and Figma takes advantage of that - it imports and converts to Figma, but will not allow other way round. It is one way traffic with Figma.

On first point: for the functionality that the app provides that's a pretty sweet deal. Many comparable tools will cost you more, some much more (looking at Framer/Adobe here). On second point: arguably you can do a lot of exporting and processing with their API. Yes, their file export format (*.fig) is not supported by anything else, but you can also fall back to SVG export for example.

45/month for an enterprise seems like nothing. How many editors could a company have? If every editor costs ~50k (I'm making this up, I suspect it's more), 540 annual is a blip.

It's great to collaborate, but unless you're actively with a client/team demoing something, it's more of a distraction. For the money you'd spend on one month of Figma, you can get something like Affinity Designer and pocket the $495. And you'd get a native file to do with as you choose... in perpetuity.

The point is that a company is not going to care about pocketing 495 dollars, or even twice that, when they're spending 50k on a designer. They wouldn't even think twice.

If you're not with a team you don't need the enterprise license and can use everything for free.

Compare $45/month to $33/Month (Photoshop). Edited the price & feature info.

Photoshop has 20+ years of development behind it, tons of feature across different domains (UI, photography, animation to print production), cutting edge Visual Computing features.., plus 1TB cloud storage. https://www.adobe.com/plans-fragments/modals/business/modals...

The key word is $45/month for the functionality it provides.

[Disclaimer - NOT A fan of Adobe and trying to get away from the shackles of it.]

12 dollars a month is literally nothing to a company that is spending 10s or 100s of thousands on an editor. No one should think twice about that pricing.

I pay for stuff like this all the time at my relatively small (8 people) company. It is a blip on our burn chart, it all gets rolled up into a "doesn't matter" column because the cost of each license per engineer is less than a percent of their salary.

So you're comparing enterprise license of Figma with individual license for Photoshop? That's a tad unfair seeing as individual Figma license is free.

Thanks. Updated the enterprise price info for Photoshop ($33 vs for personal $25)

Adobe's Figma equivalent is called "XD", as in Adobe XD. Photoshop isn't designed for interactive prototyping. Of course it's still used to develop high fidelity website mockups.

It makes no sense to compare the prices without also comparing how their wildly different feature set applies to your needs.

Figma and Photoshop are totally different in functionality. Comparing their prices is like comparing a ham sandwich to a 9 volt battery.

Cost of setting up and running (at profit) a Ham sandwich kitchen vs a 9v battery factory we are talking about.

Pricing should be decided by not whether one can pay but if it's worth it.

I'm paying Jetbrains full product package for just < $15/mo. Surely Figma isn't providing 3 times more productivity than all of their tools combined.

There's a difference between I can pay and I don't want to pay.

You're talking about a single user license. At a company it's a no brainer, the difference between 15 and 50 dollars is 0, it is de-facto "worth it".

Sketch can be as open at it wants, as long as it doesn't do Windows, it is worthless for our designers to give their stuff to the development teams, so XD and Figma it is.

Maybe someone will be helped to discover https://icons8.com/lunacy - a free graphics program for Windows which works with Sketch files and supports basic operations.

On your second point: yes, be careful. It feels a bit like a dirty tactic. To support the open philosophy of Sketch we keep buying Sketch updates, besides our Figma subscription. Long term stuff, that we need to preserve, we make in Sketch. One-offs we make in Figma.

At first I was assuming that the critique of $45/mo for the enterprise license was that it was too cheap, something I agree with! It's definitely not too much.

For large companies making dozens-to-hundreds of millions in revenue, $45/mo is a completely irrelevant rounding error. And the power of tightening the feedback loops that the article alludes to is worth far, far more than that.

Are the Figma files available through the Figma API what you are searching for? Though it only seems to enable read access and "interactions".

- [1] https://www.figma.com/developers/api#files

I am for paying for software. An application like Figma is way more complicated than you’re giving it credit for. Making all software free devalues the whole industry. It’s fair for them to take a piece of the revenue of the companies that they help.

>Making all software free devalues the whole industry.

That ship has sailed thanks to open source and app stores.

FWIW, Figma is only at #2 in https://alternativeshub.gitlab.io/web-design/software/figma/

I'm surprised by the many negative comments, as my experience is the opposite.

We're a small B2B UI/UX Design agency[1] and used to work with Sketch.

When first trying out Figma, we practically never came back (even though it was more expensive to use).

Here's why:

- Figma allows for better collaboration between designers

- Figma allows for easier inspection by developers

- Having everything in the cloud is a huge plus. Especially if you work on tons of projects. Saving things on physical hard drives (or cloud based like Dropbox) becomes a mess when you're working with teams.

- It's super easy to quickly look at a design together while you're on a call.

- Overall it Figma has saved us a ton of time and decreased communication errors between design & dev teams.

It's possible that Figma only makes sense for larger teams and isn't the best option for the individual.

[1] https://fairpixels.pro

This article seems almost entirely devoid of actual content or insight?

Yes, people love collaborative editing. I don't need 20 paragraphs explaining why?

The thing with Figma is not the idea itself, but the execution.

Everybody is trying to recreate Stratechery.

Discussed at the time:

Why Figma Wins - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23584954 - June 2020 (181 comments)

I'm on Linux, so the only way to use Figma is in the browser.

Everytime I use it, I'm astonished at what can be done with a web app — and makes me wonder: why didn't Adobe make a web version of Illustrator or inDesign?

It's a perfect example of the Innovator's Dilemma -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

I'm not trying to shill for the book, but it coined the phrase and elucidates it well. Roughly: new technology often doesn't enable much functionality that legacy technology already does. This is seen as an advantage by both sides. In truth, it's often an advantage for new tech, because new tech has advantages which old tech lacks.

WRT Adobe, there are certainly huge swaths of their product plans which are impossible with web-based tech. So web-based tech looks crappy to them. They've downplayed and ignored the advantages of web-based tech. By the time these advantages start biting them in the market they're a decade behind, and will have to build expertise in new tech in order to catch up. Most companies cannot do this.

Actually there is unofficial Figma-linux flatpak/snap package which is functional. But it is like other "local" web-apps for Windows and Mac. I hate SaaS model and I hate online only approach. But since pandemic started this is practically the only option for collaborative design. We use Sketch/Affinity for things that we want to have available offline and recreate in Figma for hand-off and communication. If Figma had offline workflow it will evaporate Sketch and other tools from marketplace. But actually this will not happen. It is cheaper for them to work on one unified code-base. Actually Framer also moved to this direction.

I'd love to see web apps handle multi-gigabyte file workloads that have the ability to dynamically link in other assets that can be just as large.

Figma is basically Canva for the design and tech savvy online entrepreneur. With the right plugins it becomes the center for all digital design, not just for UI design like other programs (e.g. Sketch).

Figmas pen-tool is quite good and suitable for more complicated logo design and simpe illustrations. With this and its plugin ecosystem it's kinda sitting in the middle between more complex Adobe apps and "fast design" apps for non designers like Canva.

Canva realized that Figma is coming for them and they've even added some basic prototyping to their app, lol!

"Companies are a sequencing of loops" .. What!?

pretty sure he's talking about processes - a successful company is one that has figured out or is constantly figuring out what processes to do in what order. He just tried to read godel escher bach and all he grabbed was 'loops'.

Maybe he's talking about the hyperloop.

I think my assumption is that he just read Hofstadter’s I am a Strange Loop and now wants to see the world and talk about the world in a strange new way.

yeah either I'm dumb or they just don't explain what that means

Wins what? Perhaps my organization is using wrong, but for the life of me I can't seem to navigate through a design presented by Figma. A link takes me to a giant white screen with all the screens in the center, far too small to see, and the only way to navigate is to zoom in, and zoom back out more or less blindly looking for the particular screen in which I'm interested. The navigation menu on the left does not appear to actually navigate to anything. It is a disaster.

EDIT: upon reviewing my post, it seems like Figma was designed and tested by people with very large monitors? It is sheer struggle for me to use it with a 13" MacBook.

I don’t love the UI but collaboration is a killer feature, just like Google docs/sheets/slides. If you work on a team that collaborates in real time, there’s really no contest, especially if it’s distributed. Before Figma we used Sketch, Zeplin, InVision, and a design-centric repo to do the same thing. Figma is cheaper per seat.

I hate Figma for:

Browser only experience. Even when I save locally a file I cannot use it when offline. This may sound strange, but the browser only approach is not future proof and makes me really uncomfortable. Pushing new functionality in my face - FigJam. No. I will not use it.

Ultimately what's makes Figma great have potential to make it awful. The new pricing is not adequate.

There is one big reason that I like Figma, beside collaboration.

It works under Linux.

The price increases, the shoddy UX, the fact that it’s made itself irreplaceable. Yeah all these things make me dislike Figma. And yet, nothing comes close for easy/fast collab.

I don't use either, but isn't Figma a web app, while Sketch is a native macOS app? Then I would choose the native app any day. Correct me if I am mistaken.

Maybe if like 93% of the population, you, or the people you share your work with, are not running macOS.

I've never seen anyone doing graphics design etc and not using a Mac to do it.

Hello, I’m one of them! For context, I’m a software engineer but also do design because I have to (startup, a free no/code website builder, boomla.com). I even bought a Mac for running Sketch but I just couldn’t use both platforms because of their differences (keyboard shortcuts).

I guess there are tons of part-time-designers who don’t switch.

FWIW maybe Sketch fixed their stuff, but in 2018–2019 Figma's performance was just so much better that I switched and never looked back.

AHHH I can't stags Figma, it's UX is terrible, it's so difficult to understand what's going on. I feel like I need a PHD to use it.

Please don't rush into the comments with a reflexive reaction to the generic topic or something in the title. That's not a substantive contribution and it makes for a much less interesting thread. It would be much better to react to something specific in the actual article. Threads are sensitive to initial conditions, so it's particularly important not to do this when the thread is fresh.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I skim read about 50% of the article and replied saying I don’t like it because the UX sucks. Because it does suck. We use it at work and it only creates more problems than it tries to solve.

Ok, but the article is more narrowly scoped than that. Generic-indignant reactions lead to low-quality threads, so please don't post those.

Instead of bugging people who don’t like Figma (on topic btw), how about moderating white supremacists off the site like this guy?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28592947

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=skocznymroczny

If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com. Please don't post off-topic complaints like this, which we may not even see.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Also, would you please stop this ideological rampage? You've been posting about almost nothing else for days now.

HN is a wide-open forum with millions of users all over the world. It's inevitably going to get the full spectrum of posts. Picking a few bad ones and acting like those define either the community or the moderators is a huge non sequitur, even though I know it's emotionally convincing. This is a classic cognitive bias (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Everyone does it, and the people you disagree with are every bit as convinced that the site is a "hotbed" or (favorite term) "cesspool" of your side.

The truth is that: (1) extreme posts are a tiny portion of what shows up here and we moderate them when we see them (see first paragraph above), and (2) HN has a spectrum of ideological views because the world has a spectrum of ideological views. You can't expect a community as large and as widely distributed as this to differ much from the general population.

I did flag it (I notice you didn’t even threaten that user with a ban btw). That does nothing apparently. It’s not “a few” bad posts. This site is overrun with this garbage. That thread has plenty of other comments that should be modded if you’re serious about running a healthy community.

You’re asking me to sit back and not be pissed that a site that is unfortunately influential in my industry acts as a megaphone to racists. I cannot and will not do that.

If racist comments were as rare as you claim I’d have nothing to respond to no? It’s extremely common.

> I did flag it. That does nothing apparently.

The comment is flagkilled now. These things take time; there's no way around that.

Literally everyone with strong ideological passions feel that HN is "overrun with garbage" and they all have contradictory definitions of "garbage" - basically whatever they strongly disagree with. This kind of feeling is a mirror of your own passions (I don't mean you personally, but everyone who feels this way, with all their conflicting points of view). It is not a reliable compass for moderating a large international community.

Literally overrun with racists then. I would think most people in their right mind would consider racism garbage.

There's no single definition of those terms, and how they should be understood is itself a contentious ideological question, so what you're effectively asking is that HN be moderated according to your particular ideology. This comes up a lot, as you can imagine, and again, in my experience it has mostly to do with the passions of the person making the demand (whatever their particular ideology).

To put it crudely, ideologically passionate people want us to promote what they agree with and ban what they disagree with. That's no basis for moderating a diverse community, and it would be crazy-making to try—one would be walking into a hornet's nest of contradictory demands (because on what basis would we conform to one demand rather than another?), and the demands would only get stronger with every attempt to satisfy them. I don't think this is a good path.

There's nothing specific that you've brought up that isn't addressable by the way we moderate HN today. The fact that we don't see everything and that it takes time to moderate flagged comments are just practical realities of running the site. Demanding that we see and take care of everything instantly is unrealistic.

(I was editing this while you were replying- sorry. I don't think I changed the meaning of the comment.)

This is racist:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28592947

Figma is just awful. They do everything they shouldn't from a perspective of building a rendering engine for graphics design. Not only that, but the endless round trips of assets to the server is so unnecessary when everything could be managed locally.

Figma has facilitated improved product management productivity via easy collaboration between designers, managers, developers, copywriters, and others.

I don't really care about the tool's performance optimization or lack thereof! It's the team's performance I care most about.

If the designers were complaining about Figma's performance, I'd see your point, but they like it too...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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