* Slow is an understatement. And huge. Like 100Mb to start working on a medium size design (~20 frames?)
* It's impossible to figure out what part of the design to code to. Like you said, the best way we figured out how to work is to take screenshots and export them.
* It's impossible to follow comments. We just take conversations to slack.
* There's no easy way to track design revisions. What's changed? Who knows?
I miss working with designers who use sketch. Even better, those who just send me a full versioned spec that I can review offline. Design changed? Just send me an updated spec? Figma design changed? I have no idea where to even start looking.
Designers love it for some reason but as an engineer it's a pain in the ass
Because they need to load the entire editor into the page. Compare that to Sketch, or Photoshop, or any other tool.
I get a Figma link and it's generally to a massively zoomed out view of the whole canvas with a ton of different workflows/screenshots spread out on it. It's often very hard to know where to start, and when you zoom in its far too easy to find yourself in the middle of empty space with no clear idea where you are in relation to any of the designs.
Our designers seem to like it but I am not a fan because it's really ####ing hard for non-designers to collaborate with designers, provide feedback, etc.
I'd love to hear of any more issues you have with Figma or your workflow in general.
What I'm working on is a web app that serves your project's Figma designs to a focused workspace where you can code them up. Different breakpoints, states, and specs are all right there, so there's no window switching and you never have to open Figma. And it notifies you of design updates.
Still a work in progress, but I hope to launch it later this year.
I don’t build web apps that just absolutely position everything on the page, there’s a document flow and I want my design app to express individual elements based on the relationships between them, not arbitrary drag and drop.
- It's built around an un-cropped 2d view. Cute-sie and unique, I know. But sending teammates links in an un-cropped 2d expanse is hit or miss. All us working in it don't know where/what one another are referring to. We've taken to slacking screenshots and pretending it doesn't exist.
- It feels super heavy weight. Load the page and look at the network requests. It's seconds just to get a menu of projects. Jumping into a project takes just as long. I assume this has to do with them trying to do a bunch of collaboration stuff that's already done by better, more established products. Why is ms paint so complicated?
- It's super clumsy to search. For comparison look at storybooks -- searchable, cropped, focused on compose-able components. Very, very simple UI. I spend minutes hunting around Figma for a random design I need to attach to a PR description when I know the name of the component I'm looking for!