Hi! I’m Dylan, CEO of Figma. @evanwallace and I have been building the tech behind Figma for a few years now and we are thrilled to be launching our Preview Release today!
Figma is a collaborative interface design tool. Our aim is to combine the power of legacy programs like Adobe Illustrator with the collaboration of web apps like Google Docs. You can do vector-based UI design, commenting, sharing, and storing all in one place -- in the browser. We also integrate with Slack.
Right now we are in a Preview Release. Sign up for our waitlist, and we’ll let you in as soon as we can. We will start by letting in the first 50 people who sign up for the waitlist using this link.
And this is just the beginning. We know we have a long way to go, so I’m looking forward to your feedback and questions.
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@bentossell@zoink for us @seeclickfix who have been testing in alpha it has been the ease of use of the pen tool, the incredibly fast image scaling and rendering and the slack integration.
@bentossell@zoink I'll let Dylan speak for himself, but as for me, I think the biggest difference is that having the creation and collaboration experiences in a single online app makes everything simpler. You don't have to worry about uploading and downloading and generally managing a bunch of files.
@bentossell@zoink And the other point that goes hand-in-hand with this is that it takes a lot of detailed engineering to create a professional-level drawing tool. The pen tool has a lot of thought behind it. The performance is really snappy. All that takes time to get right.
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@zoink@bentossell - this kinda reminds me of the "feedback" page on the Product Hunt beta.. Would be awesome companies used this for crowdsourcing design/ux suggestions
@bentossell@zoink
Thanks, Ben!
Our biggest differentiator is that Figma makes it easy for designers to collaborate with other team members on design. Today, designers are at the center of the organization; they are constantly communicating with other designers, engineers, marketing, product management, etc. By creating one place where you can design, comment and share assets, the communication overhead goes way down.
Re: pain points, right now it's hard to share design files. One thing I love about Figma is that you can share any design with a link. This makes it easy to send a design in a Slack message, embed designs in a spec document, etc.
Another pain point we're addressing is shared brand colors. Today, design teams rely on outdated PDF's or memorizing hex codes to keep their colors on brand. With Figma, you have a shared color palette your entire team can access. (We're working on something similar for assets like icons.)
The design of the site is excellent -- great type, white space, etc. Excited to see this coming out soon. Could this be a competitor to Sketch, but in the cloud?
@chrismessina Also, FWIW, I think that new products never really supplant existing ones. Google Docs didn't supplant MS Word or Sharepoint. It allowed new people to work in completely new ways. But the existing products remain valuable in their own right.
We have been using Figma @seeclickfix since this Summer. We have been blown away by the simplicity and speed. We dropped our photoshop license two months ago as a result. The pen tool is incredibly easy to use for a beginner and faster than illustrator for a pro. Watching how fast photos scale on a MacBook Air leveraging the cloud has been pretty incredible as well. Slack integration has been a huge plus for our team as well. Can not wait for the multi-player update. If it's not obvious we definitely vouch for switching to Figma.
Personally, I am excited for the day where I can do substantive work from basically any computer. Figma looks like one more step in that direction. 👏
When the internet is spotty or unavailable, how does (or will) the offline mode work?
@calc Right now, we assume that you are within spitting distance of an internet connection. So if you lose your connection for a few minutes, no problem. But we assume that you won't go hours without connecting.
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Been using it much of the year. Left Sketch behind and haven't looked back. A few reasons it's stuck with our team:
1. Its web-based nature is sneakily useful. Sharing work-in-progress or referencing design specs is just a link over Slack/chat with no software to install on the other side to view and no file sync to wait for.
2. The attention to detail in the drawing tools trumps Sketch in many ways (type, dimensions, etc.). Easy to overlook, but remarkable to experience.
3. Directionally their recent updates (shared colors, constraints) and roadmap (collaborative editing, shared assets, design with data) are super compelling.
@grabelnikov For now, our feeling is that there are so many great prototyping tools out there and they are all so different, that we'd rather integrate with existing prototyping tools and make that as seamless as possible.
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