[drcongo]

Our designers are wedded to Figma so I have to use it from time to time. I despise it. The other day I had some work to do on an old project designed in Sketch and it was an absolute joy. For a lot of things our developers end up taking stuff out of Figma and into Sketch just to be able to work in a pleasant app.

[GenerWork]

>I despise it

I'll bite, what do you despise about it?

[drcongo]

Sorry, keep leaving out details. I hate the non-native UI, I hate that copying from Figma creates something in the pasteboard that most apps won't allow to paste, I hate that to open a file I have to click a link and open it in a browser and then spend ages trying to get it to open in the "desktop" "app" because in a browser it runs like a turd. I mean, the list is long. I'm sure if I was a designer, working in it regularly, I'd probably like it a bit more, but as someone who only has to dip in and out occasionally it seems to make everything I ever need to do with it considerably more difficult than it should be. As mentioned above, people on our dev team copy and paste stuff out of it, into Affinity Designer, and then copy and paste from there into Sketch, just so that they can get decent assets out of it. Try it - select a group of objects in Figma, hit Cmd+C and then try pasting that into Sketch - most of the time you'll get nothing at all, sometimes you get some text and none of the vectors. Basically it's just not a good OS citizen - working properly with the system pasteboard is surely one of the first things you'd get working.

[GenerWork]

>I hate the non-native UI

As in, the fact that it's not built using native Mac OS elements unlike Sketch? If so, is this because it's slow even when opening one file, or just because it's not native code?

>I hate that copying from Figma creates something in the pasteboard that most apps won't allow to paste

That's probably because it's a vector and ensuring cross-app compatibility frankly isn't something that Figma (or any other program like Sketch) will place high on their todo list because designers generally stay in 1 tool.

For your last point, the only time I've had Figma open in the browser and then not open the tab in the desktop app was when I got a new work computer and I hadn't set the auto open in the app functionality yet.

Also, I'm really, really curious as to why people on your dev team go Figma --> Affinity Designer --> Sketch just to get assets. Are you looking for elements like spacing and color hex codes, or are you looking to export those assets into something like Jira so you have screenshots? Figma should be able to do all of those things in app, however I will say that if you only have view access and want to export something, someone with edit access will have to set something to be exported.

[drcongo]

UI - as in it refuses to behave as a native app in any way and they obviously don't care. For instance, it ignores system zoom levels etc. - very high DPI screen + old man eyes means I have everything slightly zoomed so that I can read it, the UI text in Figma is so small I have to physically move to actually read it.

> That's probably because it's a vector and ensuring cross-app compatibility frankly isn't something that Figma (or any other program like Sketch) will place high on their todo list because designers generally stay in 1 tool.

This is just wrong. As I mentioned further down, a complex UI element with vector shapes and text on it can be perfectly copied and pasted between Sketch, Affinity Designer / Publisher / Photo, or even Pixelmator - I'm fairly sure it's just postscript in the paste buffer. Lord knows what is actually getting stored in the pasteboard when you copy from Figma, but whatever it is there's a 1/100 chance of you being able to paste it anywhere. If you copy as SVG it produces an abomination with all the text as paths.

The Figma -> Affinity Designer -> Sketch flow is just to get stuff into an app that doesn't behave in a completely alien way to every other app.

[jjcm]

FYI you can right-click and “copy as svg” for cross app pastes, or cmd+shift+c to copy as png.

[drcongo]

That's fine for some simple shapes, but a complex UI element with text in produces an absolute abomination of an SVG that's useless when pasted into another app.

Copying and pasting a complex UI element between Sketch, Affinity Designer / Publisher / Photo, or even Pixelmator works perfectly. Every other app I have has a functioning pasteboard.

[willsmith72]

as a dev i feel the opposite, the move to figma was amazing