[jjcm]

> Figma creates a complete fantasy world for designers who do not understand that a pixel and color perfect design is going to be smashed to bits by the client.

Figma employee here. I'm curious if you see this as a mistake of the design tool itself, or if this is endemic to the constraints of html emails? Maybe phrased a better way, what would you like to see to help convey these constraints to designers?

[legitster]

It's kind of endemic to html emails.

Each client chooses how it represents html and css differently. And especially for things like dark mode, they can throw out your design entirely. So you generally stick with 20 year old design practices - lots of nesting tables - safe webfonts - flat designs etc. It's really hard to do any design work without an inbox preview tool like Litmus.

One specific feature that Figma really needs is an easier way to measure distances between elements. In email, you have to build whitespace using a lot of incongruous methods (line-height, breaks, cellpadding, etc). So the Figma padding information often doesn't work, and just having a simple way to draw a line between two elements and getting a measurement would be a real help.

[vostrocity]

There is a way to do this in Figma. While an element is selected, hold Alt and hover your cursor over any other element, and it will show the gap distance.

[manuelmoreale]

In my experience as a 13 years freelancer dev with a design background, the main issue I’ve experienced is that most designers don’t have a lick of dev knowledge and they don’t understand how easy or how complex is gonna be to code what they design. Or if it’s doable at all. Or how hard is gonna be to maintain a site designed the way they designed it. So it’s a matter of not having appropriate knowledge on the subject.

[sensanaty]

Having a dedicated "Email designer" mode where it takes into account all the limitations of email rendering would be amazing. For example, you can't use a flexbox which designers take for granted, so they end up creating things that result in monstrously complicated <table>s for emails.

How this would look/work in practice I truly have no idea, since you'd have to constrain them by removing some of those features, but then they don't really translate to regular markup/CSS 1:1 either.