That’s the tool that is used everywhere nowadays, from prototypes, mockups, concept designs to specs from designers to developers.
I personally think that a key fact that is driving adoption, is that from the very beginning they used a web app instead of going native with a heavy desktop app.
Thanks to this, you can share designs with just a link and everyone can access it, users interact with a mockup, devs look up the styles and components.
…and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products.
Their secret sauce seems to be making a complex web app fast and snappy with webassembly and an ecosystem of plugins secured with quickjs sandboxes.
I notice HN comments often that say people want and appreciate native apps/UI, people don't like web apps, and people don't want files stored in the cloud. I think Figma proves these aren't things non-tech people care about when a web app is done well, similar for Google Docs.
The ease of collaboration in teams, and being able to just click a link on any platform to preview or start working on a design without installing anything is a killer feature.
The risks of vendor lock-in, losing control of your files, or price hiking sucks though, but convenience outweighs this for most. Coming from a dev background, I'd love open file formats and being able to pick where the files are stored though.
> …and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products.
I have to use both and switching to Adobe for stuff is painful and feels so archaic now because you lose the ability to have multiple people live edit/preview a document, you have to muck around with syncing files + installing, there's no free plan, and nobody on Chromebook or Linux can use it.
For example, it's so much easier, faster and with better results to just let a client edit copy directly on a design, rather than the clunky way of having them message you a list of edit suggestions that doesn't let them iterate properly. Or live pair editing with another designer. Really hoping Figma add CMYK/printing support too (would it really be that hard when they already support P3 and non-P3?).
For Sketch, it being Mac only feels very restrictive and not a good business choice for them. I personally use so few native Mac apps, a native UI isn't something that influences me and I'm not even clear on what differentiates them now. Native UIs can also be bad as well as good, I just want an app with a good UI. I often prefer a web app because it feels like it would be more sandboxed, especially for installing plugins (like Figma allows).
I have a browser extension that I sell, and I'm so glad I didn't go the native app route. It's higher friction than a web app for users to get started, but much lower friction than a native app, and it lets me easily target Linux, Window, Mac and Chromebook.
>I personally think that a key fact that is driving adoption, is that from the very beginning they used a web app instead of going native with a heavy desktop app.
In 2018 I signed up for Figma because of the Notion integration (you can embed Figma frames in Notion), and the generous free tier. Notion took off that year as well and I think both profited from another.
Flat design removed the technical barrier of entry for design, which made a design move away from a difficult-to-use app (a la the Adobe Creative Suite) and towards something like an office suite app (Figma is more similar to Google Slides than Adobe Photoshop). And office suite apps were already popular as web apps (e.g., Google Docs) before Figma.
> …and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products.
This wasn't possible before flat design, design was a hard technical skill requiring use of light sources, noise for texture, and carefully constructed gradients and shadows. Flat design is mainly just text on large swaths of color, which makes it much easier for someone to just jump in and edit a Figma file (e.g., this was not possible with the much more complicated Photoshop setups folks were using before to create designs like this https://www.anandtech.com/Show/Index/4485?cPage=3&all=False&...)
(Note on a long-enough timeline, it's not clear how this is all going to end up. E.g., if something like Apple's Liquid Design catches up that'll move the needle back in the other direction towards more complicated software to create complex lighting and refraction effects. Note that the problem with Figma isn't that it can't add these features, it's that adding them will make the software more complicated, which will reduce the value-add of it being a web app, because the more complicated the software is, the more difficult it is to use collaboratively. Simplicity is really what facilitates collaborative editing.)
Well, with an established competitor like Sketch, you can laugh your way to the bank. SO many users pleaded their first born children to Sketch if they could have cross platform support, web-view support, real time collab, commenting system, cloud support, buit-in Developer handoff, nested components, auto-layouts - even just one of the above.
Sketch were nice and comfy and said NO to everything.
When you are coming into an established space, it must feel real good to have a competitor like that who gives away the full market to you kindly!
I honestly think the main thing driving their adoption is that you don't need to _learn_ anything to use it. For 90% of use-cases, the UI is as simple as the iOS photo editing app. It's a familiar experience from the moment you open the app.
Your most tech-savvy friends couldn't even reliably install the correct Adobe product, never mind be productive with it. Meanwhile, your grandma could crank out a deck in Figma Slides if she needed to.
Plus, their designs can scaffold easily to both web and native thanks to React framework. One day, you might be able to speak to figma AI, describe the UI, and the FigAI draws the flow/interface for you and then ships the bones of the app. Perhaps they will sprinkle in a backend too.
I recently tried Sketch for the first time, and was kind of blown away by how Figma looks identical to it. Did Figma exactly copy the Sketch ui or did they copy eachother and slowly grow closer?
Sketch was the market leader in ui design tools. Before that, it was photoshop. Only a step away from using something like blender or after efffects tbh. It was also mac only. And desktop only. It turns out design is one of those things that people like to see, and is not insrcrutable like code. So stakeholders asked to see your ui and you would send them... this file. They would then have to download the application, and deal with all the joys that come with different platforms, asking how to install the thing, security complians, licenses, etc.
Figma came in with a web app that made designing and sharing as easy as sending a link. They also had... let's say creatively viral approaches to licensing where anyone that edited a file automatically got added as a seat. But unlike those desktop applications, you could also leave notes - that's editing! So it wasn't just for designers the way photoshop or sketch was. Now instead of your team of 2-3 designers, it's like half the company. It's beautiful in a way that the latter group is way more numerous and uses <1% of the software features, yet gets charged just as much. Beautiful. And lucrative.
Anyways, they're similar because Figma made a web-based ui tool, and the base model for the workflow was already established by Sketch, so their fundamentals are very very similar.
I've used Sketch since its early days and then after (who knows how many) years, reluctantly and angrily moved from Sketch to Figma. Sketch was the pioneer and Figma took a very long time to catch up with what I've considered important features, and of course Figma had the advantage of being cross-platform but that was a non-issue for me as Sketch introduced web-based previews for clients.
The reason why I ditched Sketch (even though I loved it) was because Sketch had quality control issues over time and they started messing with my work, even losing some of it (cloud saves). The frustration grew over a longer period of time until I lost all hope and just had to admit that it was a lost cause. I peeked at Sketch's changelogs for a year and saw only bugfixes and no features. I assumed it was dead; either way the chapter was closed, the entire company shifted to Figma.
P.S. which is not to say that Figma is in a good state now, or that I don't feel history repeating itself.
I don’t have the entire history of the two apps in front of me, but Sketch was definitely first, and from what I recall, Figma copied them, at least initially.
Macromedia Fireworks was the modern predecessor of these tools that ushered web graphics back in the dot com days. It was bought by Adobe, and shuttered around 2009.
One thing I thought would have been incredibly useful for me is to go from HTML -> Figma
There is a ton of focus on going from Figma to something you could presumably dump into react or html. But I found nothing in the reverse.
Realistically, for a lot of applications, there are more things in production than in Figma. It's just not practical to spec everything out when you're moving fast. But when you do want someone to look at it or tinker, it's a huge lift to migrate your current production to Figma. I wish they would use some AI for that. Just take a webpage, and build the Figma design docs. Doesn't even have to be perfect, just good enough to get help from designers
I want to be able to refactor designs, and not entirely from the command line. I do not see why Figma should not be able to do this. Coding comes later.
They’re adopting AI so that designers within figma can create. I don’t know whether this is good or bad (I don’t design) but if the tool everyone uses to mock things up gains coding abilities, we’re cooked.
You’ll be able to go from figma to production in weeks.
Most of the offering is from current shareholders, not new shares issued. That’s non-dilutive I presume but also raises less funds for the company. Who has the privilege of selling at offer time? Employees I imagine are locked up and the stock will take a dump in 6 months.
No you absolutely can sell as employee. For that you have employees determine how many shares they would be willing to offer up for sale initially as part of the roadshow. The catch is that shares sold during the roadshow will then not have a price yet, because the price per share in the IPO is determined by the demand and what underwriters are willing to pay during roadshow negotiations. The lockup period starts after. Additionally, insiders can negotiate structured sales during the lockup (e.g. in the event the PPS gains significantly), but they again have to say how much they would be willing to sell without knowing the exact price.
Penpot (open source, web-based) has gained significant traction with a 4.0 release this year that added real-time collaboration and improved developer handoff features, while Inkscape and Krita continue to mature as desktop alternatives.
I randomly came across an app called Lunacy the other day, from stock vector and image marketplace Icons8.
I decided to give it a try. It’s pitched as a Figma alternative, but as essentially an expensive advertisement for Icons8 (the stock marketplace is built into the app), I didn’t have very high expectations.
Honestly, I was blown away. As a product designer who relies on a lot of advanced Figma functionality, I wouldn’t rely on it as my daily driver, but for a side project? I would choose it over Sketch. It covers all the basics of a modern UI design application, and even a few of the more recent additions to Figma like color variables. I’m surprised I haven’t seen more coverage of it.
I am not a designer but i used figma a lot for website projects. It is good but it took sooooooo long to load the files... even though I downloaded a desktop, still very slow.. anybody met with the same issue?
Stock is up 227% on base price. Figma wasn’t reliably profitable until very recently. Generated real cash in 2022, posted an inflated paper profit in 2023, took a one-time GAAP loss in 2024.
The IPO price started from $25 last week and ended at $33 due to increased demand. If it opens at the high range the company would be worth exactly what Adobe bid for it ($20B).
I remember the first viral blog posts about the drawing tools made for Figma. It was amazing to see so much love and attention to detail with the basic tools done so right. It reminded me more of FreeHand or Canvas or Xara than Adobe, which was a great thing. But those diamonds are now lost in the rough of a bad user interface and an app that has become progressively slower over the years. And we're still missing basic tools that the classic apps I mentioned had 35 years ago.
In the age of AI following Figma UI mock-ups has become a bottleneck; I spend more time on wrestling with styles than on actual functionality. Figma could have provided a way to integrate with LLMs, but the only thing they have is an MCP server which is behind the paid subscription and requires their desktop app...
the main driver of enshittificiation is that you need to grow profits. the problem is: your user adoption will have peaked at some point. you can then raise prices, which will also plateau. the last step is to enshittify your products to increase the margin by providing less for the same money and "reduce costs" (kick out the people/services that made the product good in the first place). the profit driven growth chasing will then kill off the product and the "capital" (shareholders) will move off to the next thing to gut and kill off for a bit of revenue.
it's sustainable if it doesn't need growth (and market beating growth at that). that would be a green flag.
I'm sure plenty of people will make plenty of money. We don't work for them and we won't be able to buy at the IPO price, but the wheel keeps on turning.
Figma is one of the worst evils of capitalism. Considered a leader in UIUX design software while its own UIUX is abysmal, full of amateur level mistakes, inconsistencies and bad patterns.
We have now a generation of designers that take Figma’s UX as an example to learn from and implement in their designs. To be a good designer today you have to learn to actively reject what Figma teaches you.
what else you could expect - Figma was born out of founder’s need to find a proof of concept test case for real-time collaboration JavaScript engine they created. They stumbled on this idea. Back then everyone used Sketch and wanted better prototyping and interaction design, and Figma appeared with its real time collaboration as major point which you used once just to try and never again. For occasional demos and in large organisations maybe it is useful, but with your average design team size is one person it’s not a problem to solve first.
And yet despite having this real time collaboration you still couldn’t collaboratively present your design. You have to shout all the time “and now, what screen you’re on, what do you see?, yes click on that button on the left”.
It shows how to this day, the UX is not at the table at Figma. They focus on opening offices all over the world and courting big clients. Because need growth, IPO.
Figma was first to employ an army of customer support “yes men” with sole task to answer in support forums and defuse frustrations this way, thus allowing Figma instead of fixing embarrassing bugs for years, to divert development resources to products nobody asked for, to fuel that growth.
Figma has became a product for investors rather than designers. And doing that it poisoned the design community, normalised bad UX and business practices.
About collaborative presentation, can't you click on the user icon (usually top right) for whoever's leading and figma will follow the screen to their cursor?
I distinctly remember that it's possible in Miro, and I'm pretty sure figma too. I think the problem you bring up has been pretty much solved.
I disagree. Designers are not dumb and understand tools and UX pretty well. There is a reason why it became so popular.
I would like to know about design tools that are so much better than Figma. I am trying to actively avoid it because it’s Thiel company but it is pretty hard.
Don't know what you're on about. I use Figma to design UI/UX all the time and have found great value in the RTC features. In fact like you say, I was using Sketch before (and tried Framer for a while), but Figma's collaborative features have been invaluable and so we use it for everything.
Jumping from "I don't need the features this popular software provides" to "Figma is one of the worst evils of capitalism" is a ridiculous leap.
The current product _must_ simply be a funding mechanism for whatever AI solution will ultimately define them. The idea that we’ll continue to have rigidly defined design mockups and specification seems relatively naive compared to generative UX defined by the user and their interaction preferences.
Imagine in that future world you describe, how immensely valuable a human artist will be: originality, wit, brilliance, their design will completely conquer any competitor generating the slop you dream of.
iTokio|7 months ago
I personally think that a key fact that is driving adoption, is that from the very beginning they used a web app instead of going native with a heavy desktop app.
Thanks to this, you can share designs with just a link and everyone can access it, users interact with a mockup, devs look up the styles and components.
…and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products.
Their secret sauce seems to be making a complex web app fast and snappy with webassembly and an ecosystem of plugins secured with quickjs sandboxes.
seanwilson|7 months ago
The ease of collaboration in teams, and being able to just click a link on any platform to preview or start working on a design without installing anything is a killer feature.
The risks of vendor lock-in, losing control of your files, or price hiking sucks though, but convenience outweighs this for most. Coming from a dev background, I'd love open file formats and being able to pick where the files are stored though.
> …and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products.
I have to use both and switching to Adobe for stuff is painful and feels so archaic now because you lose the ability to have multiple people live edit/preview a document, you have to muck around with syncing files + installing, there's no free plan, and nobody on Chromebook or Linux can use it.
For example, it's so much easier, faster and with better results to just let a client edit copy directly on a design, rather than the clunky way of having them message you a list of edit suggestions that doesn't let them iterate properly. Or live pair editing with another designer. Really hoping Figma add CMYK/printing support too (would it really be that hard when they already support P3 and non-P3?).
For Sketch, it being Mac only feels very restrictive and not a good business choice for them. I personally use so few native Mac apps, a native UI isn't something that influences me and I'm not even clear on what differentiates them now. Native UIs can also be bad as well as good, I just want an app with a good UI. I often prefer a web app because it feels like it would be more sandboxed, especially for installing plugins (like Figma allows).
I have a browser extension that I sell, and I'm so glad I didn't go the native app route. It's higher friction than a web app for users to get started, but much lower friction than a native app, and it lets me easily target Linux, Window, Mac and Chromebook.
pjmlp|7 months ago
It may be than in US, and countries of similar income levels, all designers carry Apple gear around, however 70% of the world does not.
Before Figma, we were using a mix of InVision, Adobe XD or Balsamiq.
rafram|7 months ago
It runs impressively well for a web app, but I still get multi-second freezes all the time on high-end hardware.
gdubs|7 months ago
A lot of apps start as single player and then try and bolt the multiplayer experience on later.
But Figma was designed around collaboration.
I actually think this was more crucial than whether it was web or native.
rramon|7 months ago
In 2018 I signed up for Figma because of the Notion integration (you can embed Figma frames in Notion), and the generous free tier. Notion took off that year as well and I think both profited from another.
robenkleene|7 months ago
> …and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products.
This wasn't possible before flat design, design was a hard technical skill requiring use of light sources, noise for texture, and carefully constructed gradients and shadows. Flat design is mainly just text on large swaths of color, which makes it much easier for someone to just jump in and edit a Figma file (e.g., this was not possible with the much more complicated Photoshop setups folks were using before to create designs like this https://www.anandtech.com/Show/Index/4485?cPage=3&all=False&...)
(Note on a long-enough timeline, it's not clear how this is all going to end up. E.g., if something like Apple's Liquid Design catches up that'll move the needle back in the other direction towards more complicated software to create complex lighting and refraction effects. Note that the problem with Figma isn't that it can't add these features, it's that adding them will make the software more complicated, which will reduce the value-add of it being a web app, because the more complicated the software is, the more difficult it is to use collaboratively. Simplicity is really what facilitates collaborative editing.)
lenkite|7 months ago
Sketch were nice and comfy and said NO to everything.
When you are coming into an established space, it must feel real good to have a competitor like that who gives away the full market to you kindly!
OtherShrezzing|7 months ago
Your most tech-savvy friends couldn't even reliably install the correct Adobe product, never mind be productive with it. Meanwhile, your grandma could crank out a deck in Figma Slides if she needed to.
tiffanyh|7 months ago
Just look at FB, GitHub, LinkedIn, etc…
belter|7 months ago
nvr219|7 months ago
arrty88|7 months ago
neom|7 months ago
https://madebyevan.com/figma/
https://madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-design-...
https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-... (old but interesting still)
Fraterkes|7 months ago
preommr|7 months ago
Figma came in with a web app that made designing and sharing as easy as sending a link. They also had... let's say creatively viral approaches to licensing where anyone that edited a file automatically got added as a seat. But unlike those desktop applications, you could also leave notes - that's editing! So it wasn't just for designers the way photoshop or sketch was. Now instead of your team of 2-3 designers, it's like half the company. It's beautiful in a way that the latter group is way more numerous and uses <1% of the software features, yet gets charged just as much. Beautiful. And lucrative.
Anyways, they're similar because Figma made a web-based ui tool, and the base model for the workflow was already established by Sketch, so their fundamentals are very very similar.
jastuk|7 months ago
The reason why I ditched Sketch (even though I loved it) was because Sketch had quality control issues over time and they started messing with my work, even losing some of it (cloud saves). The frustration grew over a longer period of time until I lost all hope and just had to admit that it was a lost cause. I peeked at Sketch's changelogs for a year and saw only bugfixes and no features. I assumed it was dead; either way the chapter was closed, the entire company shifted to Figma.
P.S. which is not to say that Figma is in a good state now, or that I don't feel history repeating itself.
jondwillis|7 months ago
ardit33|7 months ago
I loved that tool
bredren|7 months ago
bko|7 months ago
There is a ton of focus on going from Figma to something you could presumably dump into react or html. But I found nothing in the reverse.
Realistically, for a lot of applications, there are more things in production than in Figma. It's just not practical to spec everything out when you're moving fast. But when you do want someone to look at it or tinker, it's a huge lift to migrate your current production to Figma. I wish they would use some AI for that. Just take a webpage, and build the Figma design docs. Doesn't even have to be perfect, just good enough to get help from designers
esafak|7 months ago
reactordev|7 months ago
You’ll be able to go from figma to production in weeks.
mrcwinn|7 months ago
twothreeone|7 months ago
raincole|7 months ago
bryanhogan|7 months ago
[1]: https://penpot.app/
freefruit|7 months ago
ethan_smith|7 months ago
mortenjorck|7 months ago
I decided to give it a try. It’s pitched as a Figma alternative, but as essentially an expensive advertisement for Icons8 (the stock marketplace is built into the app), I didn’t have very high expectations.
Honestly, I was blown away. As a product designer who relies on a lot of advanced Figma functionality, I wouldn’t rely on it as my daily driver, but for a side project? I would choose it over Sketch. It covers all the basics of a modern UI design application, and even a few of the more recent additions to Figma like color variables. I’m surprised I haven’t seen more coverage of it.
serverlessmania|7 months ago
a1371|7 months ago
Can someone explain the advantage of simultaneously having these four massive companies as book runners?
mitchell_h|7 months ago
vismit2000|7 months ago
Nazzareno|7 months ago
adidoit|7 months ago
I don't think they can afford to be a follower on AI but being a leader will also be untenable.
ygritte|7 months ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44737346
jbs789|7 months ago
nottorp|7 months ago
robotnikman|7 months ago
Fendy|7 months ago
belter|7 months ago
We are in a bubble.
paxys|7 months ago
usaar333|7 months ago
msephton|7 months ago
koakuma-chan|7 months ago
rvz|7 months ago
Now, the enshittification, price increases and lock-in begins when they ring the opening bell to list on the NYSE.
What an incredible journey!
perfmode|7 months ago
raduan|7 months ago
rcstank|7 months ago
ToDougie|7 months ago
xucian|7 months ago
is this happening with most ipos? what green flags should we look at as hits that "this company is different"?
GreenWatermelon|7 months ago
The only possible green flag os "Did not ipo"
RamblingCTO|7 months ago
it's sustainable if it doesn't need growth (and market beating growth at that). that would be a green flag.
jauntywundrkind|7 months ago
Congrats to Figma on building well the first time though! The deliberately craft thought out web architecture made a difference!
egorfine|7 months ago
artur_makly|7 months ago
owlninja|7 months ago
swarnie|7 months ago
anonymous344|7 months ago
october8140|7 months ago
dostick|7 months ago
what else you could expect - Figma was born out of founder’s need to find a proof of concept test case for real-time collaboration JavaScript engine they created. They stumbled on this idea. Back then everyone used Sketch and wanted better prototyping and interaction design, and Figma appeared with its real time collaboration as major point which you used once just to try and never again. For occasional demos and in large organisations maybe it is useful, but with your average design team size is one person it’s not a problem to solve first. And yet despite having this real time collaboration you still couldn’t collaboratively present your design. You have to shout all the time “and now, what screen you’re on, what do you see?, yes click on that button on the left”. It shows how to this day, the UX is not at the table at Figma. They focus on opening offices all over the world and courting big clients. Because need growth, IPO.
Figma was first to employ an army of customer support “yes men” with sole task to answer in support forums and defuse frustrations this way, thus allowing Figma instead of fixing embarrassing bugs for years, to divert development resources to products nobody asked for, to fuel that growth.
Figma has became a product for investors rather than designers. And doing that it poisoned the design community, normalised bad UX and business practices.
sacredSatan|7 months ago
I distinctly remember that it's possible in Miro, and I'm pretty sure figma too. I think the problem you bring up has been pretty much solved.
omnimus|7 months ago
I would like to know about design tools that are so much better than Figma. I am trying to actively avoid it because it’s Thiel company but it is pretty hard.
fastball|7 months ago
Jumping from "I don't need the features this popular software provides" to "Figma is one of the worst evils of capitalism" is a ridiculous leap.
crakhamster01|7 months ago
There's a "follow me" feature to see what other users are doing. It's been around for several years.
truetraveller|7 months ago
andsoitis|7 months ago
Isn’t the growth proof that those products ARE what people want (whether or not they ask for it)?
mschuster91|7 months ago
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jordanscales|7 months ago
fastball|7 months ago
neko_ranger|7 months ago
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unknown|7 months ago
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TriangleEdge|7 months ago
BSOhealth|7 months ago
unknown|7 months ago
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xwolfi|7 months ago