(ex-Adobe, on a team highly related to an area where Figma out-executed XD, less knowledge about genAI stuff)
> Adobe has probably captured back both mental and market share from Figma
GenAI/Firefly's success is in a totally different domain to what Figma's doing. Figma's equivalent at Adobe is XD, which has never held a candle to Figma. The existential problem Adobe tried to buy their way out of still exists in the same form at, if anything, a greater severity. I was at Figma's config conf this year and they're finally shipping stuff I tried unsuccessfully to get from the XD team _years_ ago.
> potentially, they might have been working on integrating into Adobe over the past year
Highly, highly unlikely. I have no insider knowledge of Figma, but Adobe's a grown up company and _really_ does not fuck around on the legal stuff (which is part of the basis of Firefly's success – significantly cleaner legal provenance on their training data). Everyone I've spoken to at Adobe says they've been kept at a long arms length.
As a graphics designer of almost 20 years i have to heavily agree. Firefly is nice for drafting and dabbling with stuff that once would've been served by stock sites, but aside picking a few demo images or making some abstract pattern backgrounds here and there, this has close to zero overlap with the UI/UX into development & design system management process Figma serves. It's almost like saying the Bing bot eats away at Laravels user base.
As a personal aside:
I'd like to commend the initial push you guys did with XD. While Figma was still out of my scope back then, and XD played a major role for me in transitioning away from oldschool Photoshop or Indesign mockup processes into a modern workflow that integrates with my dev team and focuses on component & design token centric thinking.
Figma may have left XD thoroughly in the dust by now, and i honestly couldn't be happier that the merger won't happen, seeing how Adobe has been committed to absolutely dismantling the UX of Photoshop to the point of it only remaining installed on my workstation because Affinity Designer still lacks some core feature parity - but in its earlier days XD has been absolutely crucial to the development and modernization of my whole thinking and workflows!
Curious: what do you find missing in the affinity stuff? I see a bunch of people referring to it generally lacking 'stuff' but I'm curious about the sort of stuff it lacks. Maybe my use case won't be impacted much.
I'm grandfathered in with the introductory CC pricing but there aren't too many threads left in the rope anchoring me to that. I rarely do print design anymore so InDesign isn't the huge sell it used to be, and photoshop is just annoying me more each day. If it weren't for illustrator, I'd probably be gone already, and inkscape just doesn't cut the mustard for that stuff... the type tools alone in illustrator keep me there. Audition suits me way better than audacity but I don't do anything remotely intensive enough with sound to warrant a hundreds-of-dollars a year subscription.
Affinity has various workflow interrupting issues and missing features, from things Adobe figured out 20 years ago. And to be clear, I'd love Affinity to succeed at being a more serious competitor.
Just a handful from one notes file:
- No percentage document scaling drop-down option, despite featuring some uncommonly used units for design work. Instead it's hidden as a non-discoverable feature where you enter a percentage in the pixel field and it auto-converts to that absolute pixel value in-situ...
- Re-opening a document doesn't restore the state of opened/closed groups in the layer panel
- Lack of keyboard navigation for UI dialogs
- Lack of smart objects equivalent (only workaround is placing pre-existing documents).
- Can't paste clipboard contents directly as mask. In PS this is trivial using quick masks and the way they handle masks in general. Brought up in topics as old as 8 years. Agreed with sibling that masking needs love.
- Up until v2 (afaict) there was no way to disable layer auto select for the move tool
- Default zoom when opening documents can't be set to 100%
- Only has binary layer lock option, rather than separate move/edit/etc locking
- Lack of blend/interpolation of vector paths feature (another old and popular requested feature Adobe has had for decades)
- Have experienced random crashes for simple actions (opening menus, preferences, pressing warp transform, dragging layers).
- Vector node editing takes a dive in speed after just a dozen paths in a single layer. Only workaround is using multiple paths instead.
The list goes on. That said Affinity is usable if you don't mind dozens of little things that have been ironed out and included for a long time in PS. And to be fair, it's very fairly priced as such.
I really, really, really want to use the Affinity suite for more stuff, but just the other day when I was trying to knock up a basic drawing of something that exists in real life (a bicycle frame) I found that Designer couldn't draw a line of X length at N angle. It just... didn't have the option.
All I wanted to do was draw a few lines of given lengths and angles and join their ends. Then overlay another set of the same in different colors so I could see how the two groupings compared visually.
But... I couldn't.
That's such a fundamental part of Illustrator that I guess I'll be going back to it.
Quick note on Audition. It's not 100% the same, but Davinci Resolve comes with Fairlight included.
And Davinci Resolve is free.
It's an DAW that is definitely at a professional level and isn't too hard to learn as someone who was used to multitrack editing in Audition. All my VST3 plugins carry over and some of the builtin effects are just as good or better than those in Audition. It's not a light-weight program at all, but comparable to Audition.
I only find myself missing Audition when it comes to repairing original .wav files. But I haven't actually had to do that in many years at this point.
If you haven't tried it, I highly recommend giving it a try.
(I've heard good things about Reaper as a DAW and think I'll try it on my next project.)
Yeah, I love Davinci. Usually when I'm doing sound editing, it's for a pretty different focus, and I've been using Audition since it was Cool Edit Pro in the 90s. I've got a license for Ableton that I'll probably end up switching to.
The Affinity apps being slow to adopt improvements has nothing to do with “enshittification”. They’re not actively doing user-hostile stuff for the sake of their stock price, or anything in that ballpark.
The fact is that different things are “essential” to different users. Whenever they ship a new feature, some users are like “I wanted this!” while many are like “Still not shipping what we’re asking for!”
I do think Affinity should pick up the pace (and they maybe have, a tiny bit, since V2?) and address recurring forum topics more openly. But they’re not “enshittifying” their apps, they’re just not doing what some people wish.
There's also a tradeoff between implementing features and controlling stability that Adobe regularly gets wrong. Show me a professional-- supposedly their target demographic-- that would prefer to have the latest whiz bang sloppy neural network feature or some cockamamie 3D bolt-on before fixing their huge list of shitty bugs.
To be honest it took a long time in Photoshop to have something as good as it is now. Masking is the bane of my existence when I have to do it (but I'm only an amateur, so, not often).
Totally true, but that doesn't change the cost/benefit ratio of actually using the product for professional work. Masking is one of those fundamentally necessary tools for efficiently making professional looking photo composites and even more so for regular graphic design type work. Doing hobby work it would definitely be less of an issue.
> (which is part of the basis of Firefly's success – significantly cleaner legal provenance on their training data).
Yeah... I mean the pre-trained text encoder Firefly uses is filled with copyrighted, unlicensed-for-express-purpose training data.
Firefly is successful in the same sense that DocuSign is, in that it is selling a holistic social experience, but I think maybe don't opine on "legal provenance on their training data" until you have seen the whole pipeline with your own eyes. Sophisticated people sort of know Adobe's claims are bullshit, but what exactly do you expect the community to do, speculate on the exactly zero evidence Adobe has shown of how any of their stuff works?
Anyway, I am pretty sure Adobe is delighted they are not paying $20b for something that is worth way, way less. Like maybe $500m at most.
Meanwhile the people using Figma at many companies are getting laid off. Etsy, Bytedance, Unity Spotify, Salesforce all made massive UX designer cuts.
The real question is, is the thing people are using Figma for even worth $20b? No, no way. Figma users work in the Making Bugs department: they make new buggy things nobody asked for, that aren't lists or spreadsheets but should just be lists and spreadsheets, which makes everything worse. There is nowadays positive ROI to doing less Figmaing. In my opinion there has always been more ROI to doing less Figmaing, to straight up not having those people around and not gathering so many opinions on designing lists from so many stakeholders. That holistic experience is expensive in many ways, and while again you can be successful delivering that, it doesn't mean it makes sense.
Just look at the Spotify app. It's a hot abject mess of absolute garbage UI. They have been diehard Figma users for years. They are the prime example of Figmafication ruining something extremely simple. It's fucking lists! Lists are not worth $20b.
I think this shows that you don't fully understand UI/UX and its importance/role in modern software creation. Moreover, you're conflating your opinions about Spotify with an industry. This would explain what I consider to be an mis assessment of the situation.
As someone close to UX my entire life, Figma is a well positioned and useful app that has no decent substitute on the Adobe side. It has market share and potentially a huge data moat giving them a leg up on the "AI Designer" problem. Now more than ever, it is worth a lot.
That is a pretty cynical take on what UX designers do. The PMs should be dealing with lists and spreadsheets, often they don’t and just tell the designer to just design the product in a mock. It isn’t the way things should go, just like how having programmers decide the UX while they are programming the UI leads to disaster.
What's so bad about the Spotify app? For the most part, it looks like a bunch of lists (not so much spreadsheets) to me...
As someone that is only tangentially in the design space, why do you think collaborative design works so poorly? I have noticed that, in engineering reviews, complex backend designs get scrutiny, but rarely "I feel..", "I prefer..." types of comments, whereas frontend teams get all types of those comments. Is it a matter of too many cooks in the kitchen or something else?
It is a bunch of lists, but the UI is sometimes the lists are scrolling horizontally album covers, sometimes they are popping up from menu buttons, sometimes they go full screen and scroll normally, sometimes they are cut short to 5 elements and you cannot see more, sometimes they continue to 20 elements and you can press to see more, sometimes it's a list with headers that all contain more than a presentable number of elements and you have to tap the header to see more, sometimes it's a mix of horizontal and vertical scrolling sections, sometimes it's squares and sometimes it's rectangles, sometimes your whole list is shrunk because of a popup up top that is going through a list of items they want to notify you about but the popups are shown one session at a time, sometimes they have a full screen popup that is going through that list of items, sometimes you are driving your car or trying to find a song for a baby or trying to do your run and you are being shown many different kinds of lists when a simple, scrolling up and down list with a search box would be preferred, but instead there is so much stuff they want to show you in these lists in so many different shapes that you didn't ask for.
Do you know what the provenance of this morass is, at Spotify? There are many, many Figmas, each a UX designer hoping to reinvent the list in their own way, various product managers competing for attention from the user to introduce a Feature and Increase Engagement for their Key Performance Indicators. The user is better served without any of this stuff.
Man, have you seen the Google Maps and Gmail apps? Google doesn't use Figma either, but the ethos isn't unique to Spotify, it is absolutely toxic. The amount of crap I can accidentally tap on while driving using Google Maps, telling me information I absolutely do not care about, trying to get me to Do Something for Some Product Manager's Product: it's negative ROI.
> why do you think collaborative design works so poorly?
To me, using Figma is a symptom of the incompetent people outnumbering the opinionated and competent. It's not so much that collaborative design works poorly, I'm sure it works very well in Apple's design org. But that's not what the Figma product is. It's a holistic social experience of giving 10x as many people the ability to inscribe their opinions and get credit for participating in a project, as corporate people do, which is very valuable to 10 subscribers as opposed to the 1 person actually doing the work. It's a great business!
It’s always been wild to me how incongruous / inconsistent the experience of using Spotify’s web/ios/android apps have been. It points to an organizational mess rather than a Figma mess, but maybe it also shows that Figma doesn’t address the entire picture yet of addressing org level communication and syncing with prod assets
At least to the specific, valuable role of a UX designer, the biggest problem with Figma is it has no opinions or affordances for improving HCI. The best UX designers have strong HCI opinions and Figma does nothing for them. It is fundamentally a tool to (mis)-style lists. So it is unfortunate it is adopted as much as it is, UX designers should be spending their intellectual energy on more scientific stuff.
> It points to an organizational mess rather than a Figma mess
The two are related. It's like Conway's law.
Figma has some pretty generic opinions about how apps or shit should be made. (https://www.figma.com/blog/working-well/). Like it has this collaborative editing multiplayer thing going on, but you could just ignore that, many bosses effectively use it to tell subordinates exactly what to do without any feedback. Nonetheless they have countless public materials espousing the things it can do and how using those features to the max, especially collaboration, is the Right Way.
However if your way of doing things aligns with its unique value proposition, such as by requiring many people to collaboratively turn simple lists into confusing lists, that is bad.
If you lean into what Figma writes is "Working Well," you will create an app that looks and feels like Spotify. That is what I am saying. It's on Figma.
This isn't a fringe opinion by any means. SAP users get the most success from conforming their business to the way their SAP vertical solution says to do things. Git is also opinionated.
Jira had an opinionated way of working, Agile is a manifesto for how people should do stuff. One task, exactly one assignee is really radical! You can go and read about Jira and Asana saying "no" when people ask to allow multiple assignees. Trello got rid of that, assign as many people to a card or task as you'd like, it's less opinionated, and in my opinion, it's an inherent flaw. And woe be onto people who use Trello, that is telling me right away that they are going to be slower than Jira and Asana users.
> Figma doesn’t address the entire picture yet
The core dynamic they provide software for - and this is just as true of Google Docs and Sharepoint - is that BigCo employees need to touch things and get credit. Every BigCo I've worked with, without fail. There are like 10 people on meetings, and 9 people don't do anything but they use the stuff they touch and the calendar entries as collateral in their performance reviews.
None of the things you've highlighted have ever, as a user, registered with me. What I want from a music app UI is a good search function, playlists, and then it's really down to content, content, content.
For an app like that I just need the UX to be "good enough".
I don't like spotify's UX much either, but I don't blame my hammer for the lopsided chairs I built. Plenty of crappy UIs were designed in Adobe Photoshop before Sketch came around and introduced tooling better suited for UX mockups. It's not the tool it's poor product and experience development you're complaining about.
Wow, I hadn't thought about it through that lens exactly, but you are 100% right. Virtually everyone in large organizations (engineers, PMs, designers) are incentivized to launch things that align with their end-of-year performance goals. Those goals are sometimes at odds with the best overall customer outcome.
I hadn't thought about figma specifically as being a symptom. I'm sure some organizations use it effectively, but I can see how it might spiral out of control to result in an "I'm helping too" sort of ethos, with a poor net outcome.
As a UX writer, the ability of providing feedback or editing UI text before a disastrous piece of Loren Ipsum goes to production is very, very valuable. What's the feedback you think is silly here?
I believe that's what Cory Doctorow calls 'enshittification'. I don't blame UX designers and Figma for it though, and I think this comes from the corporate stakeholders rather than the PMs. Full disclosure, I'm a PM similarly annoyed by the enshittification of once excellent apps. Maybe too many large companies are stuck releasing features on a regular cadence without many interesting user problems to solve.
I never questioned that 20B was high. It's also important to keep in mind that Adobe has failed for years with xD - so the value to them is quite different than it would be to almost any other purchaser
The poster clearly has an axe to grind with Figma and anyone who is involved with UX decisions at most companies. Being mad at Spotify doesn't mean Figma is worth around 1 years of ARR (assuming they met their 2023 growth)
You might be confusing it with something else: Figma is merely for prototyping and designing, it's not the application that is shipped to end users (so it's like blaming the bugs of an app on its photoshop mockup).
Yeah usually the step kids aren't allowed to talk to each other until after the ceremony. In fact it might be illegal for the two companies to do anything regarding the merger until the transaction is concluded. That is when you'll see the HR, Marketing, Sales, and Legal teams have layoffs because typically post-merger those areas don't require duplicate teams.
Anecdotally, but at least three studio's and designers I work with switched to Figma because "it became Adobe". They made the switch because Adobe gave it some sort of "stamp of approval".
From two, I'm certain they'll never go back to XD and/or illustrator. One, I'm not too sure because all their onboarding, libraries and education is around "adobe products".
So, at least from N=3, I dare say that the attempted merger only made the existential problem for Adobe worse.
Curious: would you say that's reflective of Adobe's dev culture as a whole? I heard some similar comments coming out of a (claimed?) Lightroom developer about the motivations for that project...
Also ex-Adobe, worked directly with regulatory compliance in my role there. Adobe is a huge company with a diverse set of dev team cultures, but is a monoculture in regards to legal and regulatory compliance. They do not fuck around. (They're also very serious about security post-2013.)
How is/was Figma so superior to XD exactly? I used to work with XD and briefly also used Figma, but never really liked it (seemed like a crude version of XD in a way), so never understood all the Figma rage. Genuine question, not challenging the view at all. The only pluses I saw for Figma over XD were that it was perhaps easier to collaborate and didn't need installation (because it is web based).
In my view the fact that figma has been built for realtime collab just places it on totally different league. It's like office vs gdocs. It tool Microsoft years (a decade?) To catch-up and accept that most people collab online one way or the other
+1 this. Website design has become an increasingly iterative, collaborative process inside companies. You can't just launch a new website and surprise your team. People need to annotate comments, and constant iteration is the name of the game. Design, solicit feedback, integrate, iterate, repeat.
There's also a lot of work needed up-front on responsive design (as opposed to it being an also-ran or afterthought), and a move away from older typical WordPress-oriented static designs to modern dynamic JAMstack-oriented development methodologies.
Except people in a typical company who might provide quality feedback on the new website, do not want to "browse Figma". They want an actual website to view - dev site or the actual new live site.
> "You can't just launch a new website and surprise your team."
Yes you can. Nothing beats launching a new site to motivate quality feedback. If you expect feedback to arrive soon after launch, you can use this to your advantage.
If you like the sound of crickets, share a link to Figma and ask people for feedback. Designers and developers will respond, others like sales and non-technical staff often won't. Why? Because people prefer the security of their web browser's familiar reference point when assessing a website. As opposed to browsing an app that gives them a special window to a slippery canvas where an impression of the website is found.
That’s why you send them the link to the prototype, which opens in their browser, not the figma link.
That’s like half the point of prototyping software vs graphic design / illustration software!
Non-designers want to see “the site” open in their browser and be able to click through the pages, instead of use some design app—that’s like half the point of figma.
> Adobe has probably captured back both mental and market share from Figma
GenAI/Firefly's success is in a totally different domain to what Figma's doing. Figma's equivalent at Adobe is XD, which has never held a candle to Figma. The existential problem Adobe tried to buy their way out of still exists in the same form at, if anything, a greater severity. I was at Figma's config conf this year and they're finally shipping stuff I tried unsuccessfully to get from the XD team _years_ ago.
> potentially, they might have been working on integrating into Adobe over the past year
Highly, highly unlikely. I have no insider knowledge of Figma, but Adobe's a grown up company and _really_ does not fuck around on the legal stuff (which is part of the basis of Firefly's success – significantly cleaner legal provenance on their training data). Everyone I've spoken to at Adobe says they've been kept at a long arms length.