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Comment by danielvaughn | Hacker News Reader

That's probably by historical incident. I'm a big advocate of open source design tooling, and I think the reason they haven't taken off as much is because design tools are generally ignored by developers. We spend loads of free time building open source developer tools, but there doesn't seem to be as much excitement as building solutions for the design side.

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There's an element of that, but I think design tools tend to be ignored by designers as well. It took well over a year to get my last design team to even consider looking at Figma seriously. I've worked with several that have big gaps in understanding their day to day software. To some degree the issue can be lock in, but people also just seem to want get in and bang something out, even if the process is sub-optimal (and that can be valid.)

I've used several tools over the years and am not afraid to jump into a new UI or workflow, but have come to believe that's an exception and probably driven by the dev part of my brain.

Yeah I can see this. I think Figma might have changed the culture a bit, though that perception could be driven by the more vocal explorers on Twitter who post about new features and such.

It could be that much of design tool "output" is source-of-falsity, i.e. experiments, drafts, non-production work that is left in an ideation stage. For stuff like that, there's more breathing room for less-sophisticated products to shine.

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