As a designer, I find it genuinely perplexing and distressing that UI design apps continue to get created that don't support automatic layouts. Dragging and nudging things around is horrendously inefficient. The one app that does this – Antetype – has been almost entirely ignored by the design community.
Absolutely. I can't stand precision mousing (or "pointing"). Just watching that demo makes me tense.
There will always be a place for people who want pixel perfection. I think that place is called print. Eventually, we're going to let go of the idea that we control layouts at the concrete level (as opposed to a more semantic level, i.e. describing relationships and constraints), but that future is harder to see.
Yes and ignores the multi-device climate where the designs ultimately will live. Makes me think the pixel-perfect prototype is creating a bit of a fiction. Of course most good designers keep that in mind, but I agree that it's really disappointing that more tools aren't built to have a responsive canvas where you can play with sizing and set how the design responds. The answer I hear is to get to HTML prototypes as soon as possible, but it's not as fast to "sketch" in that medium (thus frameworks like bootstrap), so I think potential ideas are left unexplored.
Automatic layout systems can constrain your thinking. Especially early on, you want to be able to tweak things and try lots of different options. Once something is in the automatic layout system, it's easier to explore the space of options the system can handle. But making even a small change outside that space is much harder.
Sketch has some plugins for constraints. In fact one of the nice things about Sketch is the plugin ecosystem to extend the features - I wonder if Figma will become extensible.
This.
I always bang my head against a wall after getting new mockups from our design team.
what happens for small screens ? what happens in landscape ? what happens for tablets ?
are questions they entirely ignore.
They just conceive one screen size (large smartphone) in sketch and can't be bothered to consider any edge case.
I want to like Figma but they've chosen a rather limiting way for a professional design tool, cloud-first and based on web technologies.
Surely, Figma beats Sketch for modern interface design by using retained mode rendering (although sacrificed some quality [1]) and being superior at science and engineering.
But it's such an inefficient use of resources that it will die quickly on complex projects or illustrations. Raster graphics and any processing on CPU is also a huge pain [2].
Yet it's in their power to make a proper offline app [3]. I hope they'll eventually choose this route. I also hope they won't be as greedy as Adobe.
So you have to store your data in their cloud? How secure is their cloud? I'm not sure that model works for some companies. Visual prototypes can be really sensitive data, and each new proprietary cloud inevitably has bugs and security holes that need to be discovered and patched.
If you could plug in something vetted and thoroughly pen-tested like Dropbox that might work better. But a brand new cloud is almost guaranteed to have security holes, and I wonder how laser focused a design tool company can be on staying ahead of threats.
I have to hand it to Figma. They've managed to make this about as usable as possible. The issue though is that it's still in the browser, and aliasing is very difficult[1]. I eagerly await a macOS release.
Figma is by far the best vector tool I've used in my life. What takes me an hour in Illustrator I can do in 20 minutes with Figma. (I'm sure if you'be been using Illustrator for 20 years and have all the keyboard shortcuts memorized you'd disagree, but I'm coming from the perspective of someone who uses this type of tool once every couple of weeks.)
That is a fantastic landing page. Immediately shows what it is and how it's used without being an over-the-top display of CSS like half of all the app/service landing pages out there.
Realtime collaborative app for designers? Neat! Also glad to see that it does more than just mobile designs. I just feel bad for the designers who are going to try to use this with their non-designer customers.
Off topic, I wish I could have scrolled through the page without it causing my anxiety to flare up with the constant scroll-stuttering. This isn't a slow computer either, 24GB RAM and 3.2 GHz quad core Mac Pro.
I wish there was an open standard for layered vector/bitmap files, so it wouldn't matter what tool you use, and you could pass design source files around to people using whatever software they like.
Not an end delivery format, but a source file format.
This doesn't seem as bad as a lot of tools touting that as a benefit. Always have to cringe when I see collaborative design tools pitched where you upload your work for the whole team to start sticking their oars in as if that is ever a good workflow.
Naming is pretty poor, a super popular Japanese figure company has that name, so SEO is spotty. The main site is at 4th ranked in search from what I see, but every single other result in Google is related to the toy company.
The design app "Sketch" has an even poorer name, and they have done very well for themselves. I don't know how long it took, but they are my #1 result for the Google search keyword sketch.
Also, I believe at this point in time, doesn't everyone have slightly different Google results? Google tracks users for this reason, among others: to give them more relevant search results. For instance, when I google the word figma I get this design application as my #1 result [0]. I assume your tastes and browsing habits have informed Google that you are more likely looking for action figures rather than design software.
Yeah the internet is a crowded place. "figma design" works as a search query for it. Also "figma" is pretty easy to figure out how to spell and say according to the phonological rules of English, so that's all helpful.
Great work! This looks very sophisticated and polished. I hesitate to detract at all from their good work so I don't know why I'm even saying this, maybe just looking for commiseration, but in my career I've found that collaborating on any kind of design work is a guaranteed way to ruin it.
[+] [-] webwielder2|9 years ago|reply
Here's an example: http://bendansby.com/antetype.gif
[+] [-] gavinpc|9 years ago|reply
There will always be a place for people who want pixel perfection. I think that place is called print. Eventually, we're going to let go of the idea that we control layouts at the concrete level (as opposed to a more semantic level, i.e. describing relationships and constraints), but that future is harder to see.
[+] [-] toddmorey|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panic|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nip|9 years ago|reply
[1] https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/designer/
[2] https://vimeo.com/169816724
[3] https://affinity.serif.com/forum/index.php?/topic/22644-affi...
[+] [-] ageektrapped|9 years ago|reply
Made me watch it twice. I'll be checking Antetype out for that alone.
[+] [-] dharma1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] piotrkubisa|9 years ago|reply
1. Macaw - http://macaw.co/
2. Google Web Designer - https://www.google.com/webdesigner/
But Antetype provides way better solution for managing padding/margins and moving elements. Thank you for sharing.
[+] [-] on_and_off|9 years ago|reply
are questions they entirely ignore.
They just conceive one screen size (large smartphone) in sketch and can't be bothered to consider any edge case.
[+] [-] spdustin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vladdanilov|9 years ago|reply
Surely, Figma beats Sketch for modern interface design by using retained mode rendering (although sacrificed some quality [1]) and being superior at science and engineering.
But it's such an inefficient use of resources that it will die quickly on complex projects or illustrations. Raster graphics and any processing on CPU is also a huge pain [2].
Yet it's in their power to make a proper offline app [3]. I hope they'll eventually choose this route. I also hope they won't be as greedy as Adobe.
[1] http://i.imgur.com/xWLoTWg.png
[2] https://twitter.com/evanwallace/status/673978171180474370
[3] https://twitter.com/evanwallace/status/673959396104273921
[+] [-] ricardobeat|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abalone|9 years ago|reply
If you could plug in something vetted and thoroughly pen-tested like Dropbox that might work better. But a brand new cloud is almost guaranteed to have security holes, and I wonder how laser focused a design tool company can be on staying ahead of threats.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ryanSrich|9 years ago|reply
1. http://i.imgur.com/C37gGox.png
[+] [-] citruspi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josephpmay|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmanfrin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlvljr|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sdegutis|9 years ago|reply
Off topic, I wish I could have scrolled through the page without it causing my anxiety to flare up with the constant scroll-stuttering. This isn't a slow computer either, 24GB RAM and 3.2 GHz quad core Mac Pro.
[+] [-] rasmusfabbe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanSrich|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azinman2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandGorgon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dharma1|9 years ago|reply
Not an end delivery format, but a source file format.
[+] [-] djfm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slantview|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intoverflow2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ComteDeLaFere|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zyst|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hbosch|9 years ago|reply
Also, I believe at this point in time, doesn't everyone have slightly different Google results? Google tracks users for this reason, among others: to give them more relevant search results. For instance, when I google the word figma I get this design application as my #1 result [0]. I assume your tastes and browsing habits have informed Google that you are more likely looking for action figures rather than design software.
0. https://i.imgur.com/l3SpTpl.png
[+] [-] knowtheory|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bijection|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eknight15|9 years ago|reply
Wonder if they will follow the same model as Sketch.
[+] [-] JonathonW|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nnain|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nnain|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CommanderData|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrcii|9 years ago|reply