I’m a digital product designer with decades of experience focused on UI, UX, and scalable design systems. For the past decade, I’ve been a principal maintainer and contributor to design systems, owning Figma libraries, documentation, and collaborating closely with engineering (including contributing frontend code)
I’ve led and mentored small, distributed teams and work comfortably in remote, cross-functional environments. I value clarity, consistency, and practical systems that help teams move faster and ship with confidence.
Frankly, it's insane how laughably bad under scrutiny their own examples are. It both distorted the data and made the chart less readable (labels placement, segments separation, missing labels, worse contrast). And it combined them into one, so you you'll have harder time comparing them compared to the original image! Isn't it amazing that it added a toggle? Post author seems to think it deserves an exclamation point even.
Adobe killed their Figma competitor (XD), so the reality of the UI design tools niche in the design tools market is that Figma actually has a near monopoly. Sketch still chugs along, but its market share is negligible. Penpot is a neat idealistic community effort that is lightyears behind.
This is one of the reasons why Figma continues to tighten the screws on their userbase, who doesn't like it one bit, but continues to pay.
Now, this is all not to say, that it would've been any better with Adobe's involvement, more like lamenting the fact that Figma lived long enough to become a villain.
Figma has a near monopoly because it built the better product. This is the preferred outcome compared to Adobe broadening their monopoly not by building a better product, but just by acquiring/squashing their competition.
Monopolies aren't illegal. Preventing competition is the thing we want to stop. As far as I can see, Figma doesn't do anything to give themselves an unfair advantage or prevent other players from entering the market.
Figma had 8 funding rounds in 10 years, according to crunchbase. That is an advantage compared to other players on the market that do not receive VC. If it's fair or not, that’s up to everyones own standards.
I think the more common term is to "raise money". But at the end, you receive money that you should spend. With strings attached, of course. That’s the nature of VC.
Should the other players not have also raised VC money if it was such a differentiating advantage? Perhaps they should have sold even more equity than Figma did and raised more money if that would have been the difference maker.
Adobe is in maintenance mode. They aren't willing to compete with figma because they have basically never had to compete with anyone since the 90s. They forgot how
> It wasn’t lost on us that Sketch is/was much much smoother with its usage of Mac OS’s native shape rendering.
Writing this from the perspective of someone who used to spend all day every day in Photoshop/Sketch/Figma for decades. This markedly contradicts my recollection of the state of Sketch at the time Figma was in its first public beta. Sketch's performance was abhorrent and it was constantly crashing while working with libraries. I was very skeptical about web-technology based tool in terms of performance, but Figma blew me away. It was FAST.
There's definitely others that shared your perspective. A commonly cited reason of early Figma adopters was that they felt it was faster than Sketch.
Of course, the reality was that performance is a super nuanced thing. It's always measured in relation to specific things, but ultimately summarized via a "feeling".
Aspects of performance include:
- Loading a (blank/medium/large) file from (scratch/cache/etc)
- Performance when editing (what?), panning, zooming (small or large doc?)
- Performance with a large number of simple objects, or complex objects (components? variables? nested components? drop shadows/background blurs?)
I haven't personally done some performance comparisons between the two apps since ~2018 but at the time there were definitely things where Figma was noticeably faster than sketch, a lot of things that were comparable, some things that were slower. My own very biased feeling was that Figma was faster more often than not but it's always up to the individual use case, how their file is setup, what they are doing within that file, and how they mentally weigh those different scenarios.
I definitely didn't feel like being on the web was a limiting factor. In some theoretical state, with infinite resources to optimize everything, native could be faster since you have access to lower-level APIs. In practice, that's the same argument as "it could be faster in hand-written assembly". Almost never did we get to the point where we'd use those abilities even if we had them, due to their cost on development and impact on the correctness/maintainability of the code.
For me the huge part of Grammarly's magic is that it's not just in the browser, but in any text input on desktop with their desktop app (with some exceptions). Having it only in only in one application just doesn't cut it, especially since it's not my browser of choice.
Are there any plans regarding desktop integration. Linux is woefully underserved in this space with all major offerings (Grammarly, Languagetool) having only macOS/Windows versions.
OTOH (writing from 20-year working experience with two thirds of it in early stage startups) more often than not founders are not actually competent technically or otherwise.
And “letting people do their job” at best means a permission to speak up and endlessly argue with conflicting opinions from colleagues, but not a permission to execute if that means commanding others to do something, because the delegation of power to do that is not being given due to the aforementioned lack of expertise and inability to judge if an idea is good or bad.
I think a lot of companies get stuck in a "mess middle" where they've outgrown founder mode, but the people brought in to be responsible for various parts of the org chart are not actually empowered.
So you no longer have the permissive open structure of a small company, but are still small enough that the founder is arbitrarily/implicitly making a lot of decisions that have on paper been delegated.
For ICs/people lower down the org chart this is extremely disheartening because you end up reporting to someone who doesn't actually make the decisions, but instead shields you from the decision maker & the decision making process.
https://youtu.be/JJz5D9txeGA