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Comment by The5thElephant | Hacker News Reader

I actually have the opposite problem with Figma. It is way too basic and simple, targeting every kind of design and the average designer skill level.

I work in complex SAAS product design. Basic things I can do in CSS I can't do in Figma. Things like a table? Yeah it is entirely faked and awful in Figma. Don't even get me started on anything more complicated than flex rows and columns.

Half the debate over designer/dev handoff in the industry right now is simply because of Figma's limitations and the refusal of designers and front-end devs alike to learn HTML and CSS.

We need a Blender-like tool for web and app product design. Highly capable and advanced, you aren't expected to know all of it, and it can do anything you want it to.

I need a tool that is more than just a fancy rectangle drawer.

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I agree with many of your statements but draw the opposite conclusion.

HTML and CSS are expressive, have a vast selection of libraries and tools, and can actually result in shippable code. Designers and front-end devs should learn and use it.

But I don't see the point in creating a design tool unless it's meaningfully simpler than HTML/CSS. I reach for Figma when I need to quickly mock up a dozen iterations using our design system and fancy rectangles. It's fast enough that I can make mockups in realtime during discussions with developers and subject matter experts. But if I'm actually going to take the time to set constraints to make things flex properly or make a real table then why not use HTML and CSS directly?

Because I can do way more meaningful design exploration and iteration if I am not constantly running into a tool's limitations. I work at a fast paced startup where my prototyping rapidly iterates into production and the vast majority of developers I have ever worked with don't really know CSS. If I want to implement something actually complex in layout it would be SO MUCH FASTER if I could show the devs how to do it in CSS correctly in the design tool. AND it would let me better test and explore how the complex layout interacts with real data and real users. Figma prototypes are terrible.

Figma is a great tool for 90% of basic and boring design. A lot of product design is not just basic and boring, and a lot of stuff I need simply cannot be reproduced in Figma. So yes I do just write the code directly, but that doesn't let me explore those complicated layouts and iterate on them visually the same way I could if it was HTML/CSS in a Figma-like design canvas.

There are also Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, both of which were used for UI design until Sketch/Figma appeared. Both harder to learn and more expensive.

The problem then was that the designs could be too cumbersome to implement (and also that you couldn't share files with developers as easily, but Sketch has the same problem). You can really do just about anything in PS/AI, whereas with Figma and Sketch it's almost like they limit you to what an average developer can implement with CSS.

That being said, we're in the age where you can do pretty much anything with CSS, and I totally agree with you that Figma's controls are very basic (especially for typography, there's just not enough options).

That sounds awful and after your comment, I'm glad I've stuck with Sketch.

Sketch has the same issue with handoff. Sketch does not use CSS for rendering either.

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