Why Figma Is Special

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...

> 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.

> 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-...

> 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.

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

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.

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).

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...

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.:)

>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.

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.

> 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).

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

(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.