Design for the Web Without Figma

For a few years now, I sometimes get the feeling that DHH is being a contrarian just because. I'm sure it gets that eyeballs and all. They did mention in one of their books to 'have an enemy'[0] so this is probably just part of that.

Anyway, to get back on topic, the answer is it depends. There is a time for both.

The nice part about designing in Figma is that you can focus on the design instead of all the thousand paper cuts that pop up, like how to structure the DOM, should this be grid or flex or position absolute, how do I generalise this section? How do I fucking center this thing? You may not want to, but you can't help it because you're writing code and the code writing part of the brain wants to think about stuff like that.

The reverse is also true, when designing in Figma, one sometimes forget about how things should be structured. What about hover/focus/active states? What about responsiveness?

Use the best tool for the task.

[0]: https://basecamp.com/gettingreal/02.5-have-an-enemy