[pcurve]

I ran a design team, and many really struggled with Sketch -> Figma transition, and took a long time.

I welcome many of the new features. It's great for designers who are more technically oriented, though enterable input fields would be nice.

I do wonder how non-technical designers are going to feel. The learning curve is definitely going higher.

I'm worried about the rather pricey per / seat cost. There are far more developers than engineers at most organizations, and this is really going to hurt the licensing cost. Definitely Adobe bean counters flexing its muscle.

[forkbomb123]

I doubt it's adobe flexing its muscle, afaik, the DOJ is still looking into the Adobe/Figma merger. Currently Figma and Adobe are operating independently.

[mortenjorck]

One under-appreciated effect of the announcement last year has been the attention and resources that have been directed toward Figma's upstart, open-source competitor Penpot. I tried Penpot back in the fall, and while it was impressive for an open-source tool, I definitely didn't see it challenging Figma anytime soon.

Fast-forward nine months, and Penpot has a boatload of new features as well as its own conference coming up in a few days. I tried it again recently, and it had come much further than I expected: not only have they implemented auto-layout (Figma's original killer feature, in my view), but with the added benefit of wrapping auto-layouts. They even announced a new roadmap item of grid auto-layout.

I loaded up a tutorial file and my enthusiasm was dampened a bit seeing how a complex document impacted performance – Penpot still has a long ways to go to match Figma there – but as a viable Figma competitor, I think Penpot might actually have a chance now. It's telling that even as Figma races ahead with this new release, there is one feature (auto-layout wrap) that Penpot got to first.

The funny thing would be if Penpot's rise, spurred by the threat of Adobe dominance, actually results in regulators giving Adobe the green light to complete its acquisition of Figma. Still, if this market becomes a healthy competition like Blender / Maya, everyone will win.

[pcurve]

I love Penpot!!!

They had Wrap before Figma. They have Flex and Grid!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VchMDD0PrZE

[steveklabnik]

It's US, British, and EU antitrust regulators, yes.

[dahwolf]

I know quite a lot of non-technical designers and many aren't too happy about what one might call design engineering.

Design systems, tokens, modules, over the top consistency/reuse, the programmatic approach to design is experienced by some as a major buzzkill.

[Hermitian909]

As an engineer at a large company whose moonlighted as a designer it's felt like a huge win.

It's now way easier to both stop designers from adding one-off design and interaction patterns that confuse users and to write truly reusable components that allow us to iterate faster as a company while maintaining a high level of visual consistency and polish. That's a big challenge once you start hitting org sizes in the hundreds or thousands.

[dahwolf]

No need to convince me of that, I'm an engineer.

But I still empathize with those designers. It's mechanized design which to some feel like a prison for their creativity. Even more so when all designs start to look the same across companies, and then there's AI design still to come.

What you emphasize, speed/productivity, is indeed the credo of our world, but that doesn't necessarily align with the goal of design. Take Apple, they don't seem to care about speed or continuous delivery at all, yet are widely celebrated for design excellence.

Likewise, "consistency" does not mean you found the optimal design. Even Google admitted that Material Design was a poor choice for some of their (internal) products and couldn't make it fit.

[Hermitian909]

> Take Apple, they don't seem to care about speed or continuous delivery at all, yet are widely celebrated for design excellence.

For a large software product to be designed well I think you need at least the following four things organizationally:

1. Talented people

2. A collaborative culture that allow those people to argue their position

3. Leadership that believes in good design and is willing and able to invest in it

4. The discipline to maintain consistency across many surfaces

Apple has all 4. I'm at a company that had 1-3 but really struggled with 4 pre-figma. The transition has allowed our design team to really focus their creative energies onto more impactful problems and much less time designing settings page #32. Admittedly this done mean the less talented designers have less fun when they're working, but this griping is exactly what I deal with from mid level engineers who want to work with latest shiny framework, just part of making good product IMO.

[pcurve]

One of the lead designers on my team called Figma "production tool" when I rolled it out to the org a few years ago (and replaced Sketch)

She eventually came around, but these latest features may push her over the edge. I kind of feel bad. :-S

It would've been nice if they'd incorporated more design focused features:

> Improved and more intuitive drawing tool. Bezier experience in Figma is horrendous

> Keyframes

[jozzy-james]

> I do wonder how non-technical designers are going to feel. The learning curve is definitely going higher.

how would this impact them? just use figma as usual i would assume

looking forward to giving this a spin, our design team tends to go the iterative artboard style with everything...so sussing out values can be a pain

[pcurve]

"how would this impact them? just use figma as usual i would assume"

Since designers share files, whether at the same time, or at later date, if you have someone on the team who is fully taking advantage of all the features, like the new variables, conditional logics, etc.., and you're not quite up to speed, you may not be able to do your job effectively or may mess up what others have done.

Understanding abstractions / reference / inheritance is a skill that developers take for granted. But for non-technical folks, it takes time. Many struggle for a very long time.

[butlerm]

Designing a user interface of all things is a technical job, and non-technical folks who are asked to do that should probably study those things to do their jobs well.

[pcurve]

It definitely used to be, especially back in the VB / fat-client app days. I sometimes miss it. Things used to be simpler ;-)

[whywhywhywhy]

Would have won more advocates with free dev mode than charging half price for someone who can’t edit files to get data from the files.

Beginning of the end, and I say that as a previously huge Figma advocate.

Laying low on the cost charts would benefit you more than rinsing us and getting questioned “do we need that?”

[dsgnr]

Right now I can let devs with free accounts view files with the inspect tab and leave comments. If it works like that it shouldnt increase costs.

[Xt-6]

It will require a license https://twitter.com/Chris_Smeder/status/1671566245190303744

[minorninth]

If I understand correctly dev mode access is $25/month instead of $45/month for a designer.

That doesn't sound like a bad deal to me. They're not taking away anything from free mode.

[jononomo]

How do you differentiate between a developer and an engineer?

[karaterobot]

Fairly sure they mistyped, and "engineers" should be "designers". Otherwise that is indeed a very confusing statement.

There's usually multiple developers/engineers for every designer on a team, so bringing them in to the product with features that require full privileges would certainly be a lucrative move for Figma.

[pcurve]

Yup, I meant to say there are more engineers than designers. Figma was great because we didn't have to worry about seat count cost for engineers.

[samstave]

Networking.

Send the ENG a SYN packet, and if they ACK They are an engineer... if they /dev/null your packet, its a DEV.

[riedel]

> though enterable input fields would be nice. So funny you say this. I could actually not believe that you really need to use another tool like protopie on top of figma if you need that simple functionality eg. for a mock-up.

[pcurve]

And protopie is taking full advantage of it by charging hefty premium. I do believe Figma will implement it at some point.

[whywhywhywhy]

Product designers all learn CAD, some learn DFM. Time to step up and understand the medium your work is implemented in.