One Year of Using Figma

It has been over a year since we started using Figma at Olyro. We use it for our corporate design as well as for prototyping apps and websites.

It has been a been a real pleasure to use for 3 reasons:

The last point is especially important since it allows you to share your work with a coworker or customer.

Figma is certainly not as powerful as tools like Illustrator or Affinity Designer (which ironically feels quite slow on my 2015 MacBookPro, despite all the marketing claims on the Website), but you can get going really quickly (I am Computer Scientist by trade and not a Designer, so take that with a grain of salt) and utilize existing examples and UI kits.

The component feature is really powerful, speeds up the creation process, makes it ideal to prototype apps and just makes plain sense to everybody who is working with web components all day. We further hope to try the Prototype Mode and Presentation View in the new year, which allows you to create an interactive preview of your app.

There was only a single case where I had to fall back to Affinity Designer. I had to produce a pdf in the CMYK color space with exact dimensions for our business cards. That was not possible in Figma, but could be achieved with the SVG export and performing the task with Affinity Designer.

Wishlist for 2018

Nevertheless I have a small wishlist of features I would like to see in Figma in 2018:

When wanting to draw diagrams we tried using Figma, but ended up having to go back to TikZ, since there is no real auto layouting functionality. Neither is there a way to snap to an objects outline (afaik at least, I would love to be wrong here though!)

Considering the fact we are currently going through a phase of what I would call the flat UI hype the last point does not seem to be that relevant, but a nice “emboss” or a similar effect will help when UI design will inevitably go back to using the third dimension (and I am talking about more than just shadows used in e.g. Material Design).

We at Olyro wish the Figma Team all the best for 2018!