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by dahwolf 1099 days ago
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.
2 comments
Hermitian909 1099 days ago
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.

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dahwolf 1099 days ago
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.

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Hermitian909 1099 days ago
> 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.

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pcurve 1099 days ago
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

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