[unstrategic]

When Adobe acquired Macromedia, they extinguished an entire paradigm of design tool: "design tools that create software." Back in the booming 90's, this paradigm was _the future_.

Through that acquisition, Adobe shoe-horned the world into a paradigm of "hand-offs," and Figma's leadership (namely, Sho) doubled down on the "hand-off" vision. "Play Adobe games."

The future for collaborating on software design & build looks more like Flash, and less like Photoshop (though obviously, not quite like either.) "Exactly as anti-innovative."

[crakhamster01]

This felt like a lot of words with little substance. What is the "hand-off" vision?

[unstrategic]

"Hand-off" describes a paradigm of designer/developer collaboration where a designer creates a mock-up or prototype, then "hands off" that picture to a developer who then creates the "real thing."

Hand-offs are wildly inefficient, and the fidelity of creativity & artistic expression gets largely butchered on its way into the final medium.

Contrast with a design tool like Webflow, Flash, HyperCard, or Visual Basic, where the product of the design process is production software. Figma could have gone down this route — a harder route, admittedly, but ripe for innovation — and they chose not to.[1]

Good for them: $20B. Bad for the world.

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[1] Sho's vision is that design _should_ live in a separate world, and that hand-offs are the ideal form of collaboration — because they enable design to be unfettered by the constraints of production software. I would call this a failure of imagination: it is quite possible to explore free-form design ideas within and around production software: c.f. Macromedia Flash.