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Don't forget the incredible lock in Figma has in the design space.

Figma just has to jack up the price in order to appease Wall Street quarterly.

Business wise it's got a great margin, but the avaricious nature of Wall St. will force them to enshittify the entire product, the engineering doesn't matter unless Wall St. is satisfied.

2 comments

I’m in a monthly meetup with designers (not randos, these are typically people who are known in the industry), and half the time is spent shitting on Figma. It’s not necessarily the quality of their design product, it’s the business model and their general focus as a company.

There are several things designers need that Figma has dragged their feet on for years, and when they do release them, they’re usually behind the enterprise paywall. Or they don’t release them at all, instead opting to build some horizontal product like Slides because their investors want a bigger TAM.

Figma has the power of the network effect at present, but you can only charge people to use variables for so long before they look for an alternative.

I'm curious what the missing features are in Figma from a designers perspective. You've mentioned the paywalled variables, what else? (I haven't been a product engineer in years, and have barely touched Figma in the last ~5 years)

- Clunky component and variable system; inadequate for more complex stuff with lots of parameters.

- Can't set connectors on Design files (used for documenting the navigation flow between different pages of an app).

- You can set connectors on FigJam files, but if you want to bring your components from Design files then you can't keep the instances synchronised to the component definition. And you can't attach the connector endpoint to some element inside the Design component. It's essentially just an image export of the Design component.

- Prototyping is very clunky and trying to build a flow that has elements reacting to interactions on other distinct elements is either variable hell or downright impossible.

Those are just off the top of my mind. I'm always finding threads from 5 years ago on their community forums with loads of people on the same boat and no activity from Figma side.

Adding:

- Poor typography support: can't embed fonts in files, can't tweak type enough (can't do faux italics for example)

- Subpar file/project management: can't do things like nested folders which gets overwhelming with large projects/teams

- Clunky version control: browsing long file histories is inefficient, the entire VCS UI is forced into a narrow sidebar

Also just off the top of my mind. There's also lots more if you're coming from a print design world and are thus used to Adobe Illustrator.

> There's also lots more if you're coming from a print design world

Ah, there's another one you just reminded me:

- Poor paragraph justification algorithm; there's no hyphenation system.

This one is table stakes for professional print design.

> Figma just has to jack up the price in order to appease Wall Street quarterly

Aren't designers mad at Adobe for doing exactly this?

Yup, Figma is likely to become the next Adobe. Shareholders are vastly more important than consumers as we all sadly know.

Yes. Now you can offer something similiar for less than $55 per seat per month, then to quote Bezos: “your margin is my opportunity”.