How Figma became our remote whiteboard

One of the ongoing challenges faced by any product design team is “managing the workbench”: first, selecting the right design applications in a crowded & highly-specialized field, then stitching them together to form a cohesive design pipeline. Newer software has tended toward simplicity & achieving singular goals, as if in reaction against feature-bloated programs of the past, like Photoshop.

But the pendulum may have swung too far. Unfortunately, the often one-dimensional nature of modern design tools has led to a situation where designers and product/engineering teams are forced to rely on several sources of truth: the Sketch file, the image output, the InVision prototype, the Zeplin project to inspect code, etc. As a designer who transitioned from Photoshop to Axure to Sketch over the course of my career, I’ve experienced many of the benefits and pitfalls of these applications and how they serve UX design, and I’ve learned how it can pay to shake up your system now and then to keep up with the state-of-the-art.

Over the past year, conversations in the community have turned towards Figma for its consolidation of Sketch, InVision, and Zeplin features. It caught my attention, so I decided to try it out for a few projects. After a lengthy trial period, Axial’s product team transitioned away from our suite of design products into Figma. Here’s why…

In today’s age of remote work, we’ve found its combination of features particularly effective in keeping collaboration alive. We love how easy Figma makes it to maintain a single source of truth (the engineers do too). But perhaps Figma’s single greatest asset though is its entirely web-based platform which allows for unprecedented cross-team collaboration.

I wrote an essay in 2010 about how HTML5’s canvas element would deprecate modern applications and the world would soon move away from traditional “apps” into web-based applications that were equally robust. While time has not been kind to that essay, as a decade later we still have a massive array of native…

Related posts:

This article explains message queuing, what it is, how to use it, and the benefits of using a message queue in an architecture. A queue is a line of things waiting to be handled, starting at the…

You have so much work to do, projects to finish, and tasks to complete but you just can’t bring yourself to do them. There isn’t anything wrong with that and there isn’t anything wrong with you…

As Coronavirus changes the way people lives, the need to rethink our lives is much greater than before. The construction of floating islands in the middle of the ocean is not a new idea but have…