Figma

MacTwidget

Well-known member
I think by now we've all had a least a little experience with Canva/Affinity.
A salesperson just threatened, um warn, us of a file (PDF) coming in next week from the app Figma.
No one here had ever heard of it before today.
What do you know?
How was your experience?
 
Funny you should mention this. One of my sales reps asked about it earlier this week. I had not heard of it. I told them to have their customer send us a test file (however that is done) so I can see what can be done with it.
 
Last edited:
Had my First experience with Figma last week.
Iti is like Canva but more difficult to use in my opinion.
I played around with it a little after this thread popped up last week......I had never heard of it. After 15 minutes I didn't care for it either.
 
All of these "Collaborative Web Based Design" tools seem to be based on the same underlying engine to render PDFs at the final stage. And they all suffer from creating needlessly complex & garbage files.
Even PiStop struggles with most of them, when trying to "fix" the usual roadblocks. Maybe AI can do better than what we've learned over decades...
 
Hi all,
I very welcome such files to see if we can provide a generic preflight profile that could fix them all.
If interested, please send me files me at loica at enfocus dot com with details.
 
This won't be the last time you'll hear about figma. It's completely dominating the design market, in this "digital-first" world. There are a few people making plug-ins/extensions that they think make it more print friendly, like adding the ability to add crop marks and bleed or whatever, but it's obviously not enough to replace InDesign/Illustrator. Oh but people will try! My company actually does all initial designs in Figma, because over the years things have gone so digital-first and they like having all the concepts in one place, in the cloud and collaborative. The website, the emails, the web ads, retail signs, window banners etc. So designers have to either work in figma and then recreate in InDesign when it's time to actually move them into production...or work in InDesign and output jpgs to place into figma so the work can route with the digital stuff.

And some people think "oh once Figma nails CMYK and crop marks it's game over Adobe! As if that's all there is to print. Obviously we know that's not the case, but the arguments are coming.
 
This won't be the last time you'll hear about figma. It's completely dominating the design market, in this "digital-first" world. There are a few people making plug-ins/extensions that they think make it more print friendly, like adding the ability to add crop marks and bleed or whatever, but it's obviously not enough to replace InDesign/Illustrator. Oh but people will try! My company actually does all initial designs in Figma, because over the years things have gone so digital-first and they like having all the concepts in one place, in the cloud and collaborative. The website, the emails, the web ads, retail signs, window banners etc. So designers have to either work in figma and then recreate in InDesign when it's time to actually move them into production...or work in InDesign and output jpgs to place into figma so the work can route with the digital stuff.

And some people think "oh once Figma nails CMYK and crop marks it's game over Adobe! As if that's all there is to print. Obviously we know that's not the case, but the arguments are coming.
I will cut you off and tell you that Figma is already on a downtrend of existing.

The future is self-hosted software that you own. Figma is not that.
 
I will cut you off and tell you that Figma is already on a downtrend of existing.

The future is self-hosted software that you own. Figma is not that.
Why would a software company charge you $400 for software that could use in perpetuity when they can get away with charging you $25 or even significantly more a month for the same software. Of course, they will tell you that you’ll always have the latest greatest version of this wonderful software, but we all know that the majority of “upgrades” are simply fixes to bugs that you’ve been working around.

I wish it were true that the future was in self-hosted software, but I see the opposite happening everywhere, and people are somehow getting used to monthly subscriptions for just about everything.

Don’t even get me started on the generation that uses this software on their phone and then wonders why they didn’t see the mistake they made on their 24”x36” poster you just printed 10 of.
 
Don’t even get me started on the generation that uses this software on their phone and then wonders why they didn’t see the mistake they made on their 24”x36” poster you just printed 10 of.
Why I retired. Not the only reason but it was up there. Not people using the software on their phone but viewing PDF proofs on their phone with a variety of gawd knows what viewers and having the gall to tell me the formatting was off or some such similar. I actually had a woman once tell me it OK she was proofing this way because her iPhone was the latest version.
I'm sure the situation has only become worse with people actually 'designing' on phones.
 
Why would a software company charge you $400 for software that could use in perpetuity when they can get away with charging you $25 or even significantly more a month for the same software. Of course, they will tell you that you’ll always have the latest greatest version of this wonderful software, but we all know that the majority of “upgrades” are simply fixes to bugs that you’ve been working around.

I wish it were true that the future was in self-hosted software, but I see the opposite happening everywhere, and people are somehow getting used to monthly subscriptions for just about everything.

Don’t even get me started on the generation that uses this software on their phone and then wonders why they didn’t see the mistake they made on their 24”x36” poster you just printed 10 of.
90% of Figma's features could be recreated by a single person using Claude Code, in a few afternoons.

My friend made a self-hosted podcast app in a single paragraph-long prompt with Claude Code. You can access the self-hosted app from any computer. Playback data and all relevant information is shared between devices, and no one can see what you are doing, so no one can sell you ads based on what you're listening to, or infer data on how you interact with the app.

This is where we are at, right now.

Do you think the capabilities of these systems are going to increase or stay the same?
 
I have no idea how many people will use AI to create their own design apps but I can tell you that the overwhelming majority of my customers won't be. Most small businesses don't even have someone on staff that know what a bleed is or even care to know what one is. So thinking that they will take any time at all to create an app for creating content for print is a pipe dream.

To my knowledge Claude or any other AI app have limitations to what can be created on a free basis, so there you go again, paying for a subscription . . . and it never ends. Figma isn't going away anytime soon like you suggested.
 
I have no idea how many people will use AI to create their own design apps but I can tell you that the overwhelming majority of my customers won't be. Most small businesses don't even have someone on staff that know what a bleed is or even care to know what one is. So thinking that they will take any time at all to create an app for creating content for print is a pipe dream.

To my knowledge Claude or any other AI app have limitations to what can be created on a free basis, so there you go again, paying for a subscription . . . and it never ends. Figma isn't going away anytime soon like you suggested.
Spent some time this weekend working with Codex. Was my first real attempt at vibe coding. What's painfully clear is that the moat for many of these legacy apps is disappearing fast. What Canva did to Adobe will happen again, only something else will usurp Canva. It will be 10x cheaper to the end user, and developed 10x faster for 1/10th the cost of what it cost to make Canva.

Does that make more sense? I'm not saying everyone will just go make their own app, but those that see too much value flowing to a single player will see an opportunity to step in and offer the same thing for less, but still make a lot of money themselves. This will happen across many segments of our industry, until the "opportunity" flattens. I'm guessing we'll see similar growing pains to Canva though, where the PDFs coming out of it sucked, the controls weren't as intuitive, etc etc etc.
 
This won't be the last time you'll hear about figma. It's completely dominating the design market, in this "digital-first" world.
This will be the last time you'll hear about Figma. Valuation under 1 billion within 12 months, guaranteed. Only exemption to this will be the sale of Figma to another company for x valuation. Their data is the only valuable asset they have at this point.

How long until the exact same thing happens for Adobe/Canva?
 

Attachments

  • Screenshot 2026-04-17 at 5.28.35 PM.png
    Screenshot 2026-04-17 at 5.28.35 PM.png
    135.9 KB · Views: 49
   
Back
Top