My first and last experience with Figma was that it required a user to import existing designs in order to do anything useful, such as 'share them with the team' . I was surprised at that given its hype as a design tool but then realized the name must have been carefully chosen.
> Once upon a time, design and code worked as one. Web designers would imagine beautiful designs and turn them into beautiful websites with HTML and CSS.
This was never the case and in fact a rewriting of history. My first "proper" job in web development was taking a PSD from a designer and turning that into a XHTML template. Quite a lot of the time the designs looked nice in Photoshop but were almost impossible to implement (at least in CSS 2).
I've worked in several since then and most were using Photoshop to create designs or design guidelines to pass over the developers. I used to "cut up the design" and then implement into XHTML template and controls. This was pretty much the norm everywhere if the company cared about how the website / webapp looked.
There were some frontend designer types that would write code, but I've met actually two of them during my career as a dev that was heavily front-end focused until 2023.
Man, I started building websites and doing CGI coding in 1994 and 1995, which makes me a very early web developer and I don't remember this time at all.
In fact, I stopped coding as a job when it became expected that I would do back end database & business logic stuff AND fiddle with front-end code to make it work/look the same in 3 very different browsers, and update the code each time (I'm looking at you Microsoft) a browser vendor would do something stoopid.
It was definitely true at some places. My first job was web dev using the LAMP stack. The "developer" side of the house would generally write something up, wrap everything in a bunch of divs, and hand it off to the "designer" half who would add CSS/assets and make it look good.
Sometimes there would be more interaction to have the code output things in a form more amenable to the desired design, but a lot of the time it was really that simple - the designers worked in CSS and the exchange format was divs with well-defined classes. You can do a lot with a workflow that simple.
I imagine it's a bit harder if you're using a modern stack where your code is separated from what's actually rendered to the user by a dozen layers, but designers are quite capable of working with CSS rather than Photoshop.
Seriously. Talk about revisionist history. The web dev workflow before Figma was awful. It never “worked as one”.
I love Figma’s dev mode. Saves me and the designer time from measuring sizes and eyedropping colors. Figma also allows me to export assets myself instead of waiting for the designer to do it, or do it myself poorly from Photoshop.
The relationship between design and dev is much more collaborative now. It was downright hostile pre-Figma with photoshop and illustrator files. Nevermind versioning, sharing and comments…
I am not saying that it was the same at every company and your personal experience may be different.
This was absolutely the norm at a lot of companies. It was very normal for the developers to work in either PHP or Ruby on Rails and the designers wrote CSS.
It is also true that since the introduction of modern frameworks we see significantly fewer designers who know CSS.
> Designers would go into a design team and draw user interfaces. Developers would go into a dev team and write code. And thus, the hand-off was born.
Which is exactly what Figma solves and why it's so valuable.
Figma is the place where the UX team and dev team meet and discuss, specify design and behavior together through back and forth, and helps the dev team move from there with exactly what they need.
Nordcraft might want to be the next Figma, as it's apparently a lucrative position provided you execute incredibly and capture most of the market. But how they describe it they're not properly assessing or representing any of the current reality.
I kinda wonder what it would need to achieve to be significantly different from Figma. Perhaps if it was actually a whole production runtime where designers define front layers and the dev team codes binds them to a backend ? Basically a WordPress competitor ?
We are definitely not trying to be the next Figma. Figma does not solve this by any measure, quite the opposite. Figma could have been a web design tool, it is not. It is a vector drawing app.
Nordcraft is a completely different type of tool. It is based on HTML and CSS instead of layers and absolute positioning.
What the hell is this article talking about? Designers used to hand development teams PSD files. Or Illustrator files. Or, in the golden times, Fireworks files. Designers rarely handed us CSS and markup.
... did this person just start in the industry like three years ago?
No quite the opposite. I have been around for a long time :)
It used to be completely normal for companies to have developers who worked in php or ruby on rails and have designers take care of the css.
You are absolutely right that in the early days many UI designers came from graphic design and worked in photoshop. But the fact that they also existed in some companies isn't really relevant.
As others have pointed out, this should have been a showHN, but the article is vague enough that it wouldn't have garnered attention as a showHN. Furthermore, the post inflates the problems of design handoff to try and sell a no code editor environment. Yes, I'm aware that the platform enables coding capabilities, but plenty of no code tools can.
If you want to get into the shortcomings of Figma when it comes to hand off, I'm more than happy to have that conversation. Units that aren't valid in the CSS spec? Sure. Vector tools leading to things that are only achievable through clip path and masking? You bet. But claiming that designers and developers should have the same job when they're completely different skill sets and claiming that both roles are using the wrong tools to get the job done is no way to sell your product.
I didn't notice at first but it's one of those "blog post ads", concluding with "it's time".
Time for what? To click the "open app" button? Okay, so I clicked.
It doesn't open app. A button labelled "open app" should do what's on the tin. Instead it prompts for sign-up with terms and conditions warnings. I'm out.
Just open the app without sign-in! Why not? Too hard? Too scary? You can haggle for sign-up later. Let's see what you have right now, under the button labelled with a promise that I expect you to keep. Lying to me on page one is not a good start.
Here's an example of a web app that does it right. The button "start using Photopea" isn't a lie: https://www.photopea.com/
Seems to be missing quite a bit of history. As many here mention, there was an entire ecosystem of tools to convert PSDs to HTML such as CSSHat, Engima64, etc., and its evolution into Avocode, Sketch, Zeplin, Invision Craft & Inspect, and other preview/prototyping/inspect/export tools.
Eventually all roads led to Figma somehow, which honestly I would've never expected. Still surprised Figma became Sketch before Sketch could become Figma.
Like all the comments below, a show HN should have been the norm, but they knew that would not get any clicks and this.
However, I do not understand their pricing. If nordcraft's ppl are here, please tell me how does it work. For open source, you say there is a limit of 20k requests? . But I can always download the code/web-components and deploy anywhere I want right? Then even enterprise can do that? I do not understand it. Also it is Apache License 2.0. I can host it on my own cloud. Are there some restrictions if I do that?
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 66.9 ms ] thread"We don't like Figma. We don't like designers and developers being split. So we built and are selling.... Another tool for mocking UI designs"?
I will definitely be checking Nordcraft out.
This was never the case and in fact a rewriting of history. My first "proper" job in web development was taking a PSD from a designer and turning that into a XHTML template. Quite a lot of the time the designs looked nice in Photoshop but were almost impossible to implement (at least in CSS 2).
I've worked in several since then and most were using Photoshop to create designs or design guidelines to pass over the developers. I used to "cut up the design" and then implement into XHTML template and controls. This was pretty much the norm everywhere if the company cared about how the website / webapp looked.
There were some frontend designer types that would write code, but I've met actually two of them during my career as a dev that was heavily front-end focused until 2023.
In fact, I stopped coding as a job when it became expected that I would do back end database & business logic stuff AND fiddle with front-end code to make it work/look the same in 3 very different browsers, and update the code each time (I'm looking at you Microsoft) a browser vendor would do something stoopid.
Sometimes there would be more interaction to have the code output things in a form more amenable to the desired design, but a lot of the time it was really that simple - the designers worked in CSS and the exchange format was divs with well-defined classes. You can do a lot with a workflow that simple.
I imagine it's a bit harder if you're using a modern stack where your code is separated from what's actually rendered to the user by a dozen layers, but designers are quite capable of working with CSS rather than Photoshop.
I love Figma’s dev mode. Saves me and the designer time from measuring sizes and eyedropping colors. Figma also allows me to export assets myself instead of waiting for the designer to do it, or do it myself poorly from Photoshop.
The relationship between design and dev is much more collaborative now. It was downright hostile pre-Figma with photoshop and illustrator files. Nevermind versioning, sharing and comments…
This was absolutely the norm at a lot of companies. It was very normal for the developers to work in either PHP or Ruby on Rails and the designers wrote CSS.
It is also true that since the introduction of modern frameworks we see significantly fewer designers who know CSS.
> Designers would go into a design team and draw user interfaces. Developers would go into a dev team and write code. And thus, the hand-off was born.
Which is exactly what Figma solves and why it's so valuable.
Figma is the place where the UX team and dev team meet and discuss, specify design and behavior together through back and forth, and helps the dev team move from there with exactly what they need.
Nordcraft might want to be the next Figma, as it's apparently a lucrative position provided you execute incredibly and capture most of the market. But how they describe it they're not properly assessing or representing any of the current reality.
I kinda wonder what it would need to achieve to be significantly different from Figma. Perhaps if it was actually a whole production runtime where designers define front layers and the dev team codes binds them to a backend ? Basically a WordPress competitor ?
Nordcraft is a completely different type of tool. It is based on HTML and CSS instead of layers and absolute positioning.
... did this person just start in the industry like three years ago?
It used to be completely normal for companies to have developers who worked in php or ruby on rails and have designers take care of the css.
You are absolutely right that in the early days many UI designers came from graphic design and worked in photoshop. But the fact that they also existed in some companies isn't really relevant.
If you want to get into the shortcomings of Figma when it comes to hand off, I'm more than happy to have that conversation. Units that aren't valid in the CSS spec? Sure. Vector tools leading to things that are only achievable through clip path and masking? You bet. But claiming that designers and developers should have the same job when they're completely different skill sets and claiming that both roles are using the wrong tools to get the job done is no way to sell your product.
It is on our LinkedIn profile
Time for what? To click the "open app" button? Okay, so I clicked.
It doesn't open app. A button labelled "open app" should do what's on the tin. Instead it prompts for sign-up with terms and conditions warnings. I'm out.
Just open the app without sign-in! Why not? Too hard? Too scary? You can haggle for sign-up later. Let's see what you have right now, under the button labelled with a promise that I expect you to keep. Lying to me on page one is not a good start.
Here's an example of a web app that does it right. The button "start using Photopea" isn't a lie: https://www.photopea.com/
Eventually all roads led to Figma somehow, which honestly I would've never expected. Still surprised Figma became Sketch before Sketch could become Figma.