No Figma, I won't fit in your little box
blog.nordcraft.com23 points by AndreasMoeller 5 hours ago
23 points by AndreasMoeller 5 hours ago
> Once upon a time, design and code worked as one. Web designers would imagine beautiful designs and turn them into beautiful websites with HTML and CSS.
This was never the case and in fact a rewriting of history. My first "proper" job in web development was taking a PSD from a designer and turning that into a XHTML template. Quite a lot of the time the designs looked nice in Photoshop but were almost impossible to implement (at least in CSS 2).
I've worked in several since then and most were using Photoshop to create designs or design guidelines to pass over the developers. I used to "cut up the design" and then implement into XHTML template and controls. This was pretty much the norm everywhere if the company cared about how the website / webapp looked.
There were some frontend designer types that would write code, but I've met actually two of them during my career as a dev that was heavily front-end focused until 2023.
Well it was certainly true in many places. I was doing both roles designing and coding. I even had the title of "Webmaster" at the time.
I had to do work in Photoshop (or usually Macromedia Fireworks), and then code it up in Cold Fusion.
You are a better person than me. I would have taken the PSD, export as jpeg, add some alt text and slap that as the web page
That's how we used to do it with the <map> element back in 1995 and the Netscape 2.0 days...
And of course that abomination of a HTML tag still works:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
This is just an ad that doesn't even describe what their proposed solution is.
"We don't like Figma. We don't like designers and developers being split. So we built and are selling.... Another tool for mocking UI designs"?
Having worked with Figmas from pure UI-designers that translation to HTML/CSS is not at all as straightforward as they like to pretend.
I don't know about this startup's product but based on their homepage having (real) HTML/CSS output as a core part of the creation process would have helped me many times. Designers need to be constrained.
Expecting designers to know how to build production websites in html/css/js before designing is apparently a step people skip over these days. It creates meaningless design and dev cycles + tons of extra approval meetings by marketing/execs.
It always bothered me that people got in the trouble of making a web-app, that generates designs, and those designs are not plain web pages.
I guess one could create a really good tool where UI designers make a real web reusable pattern language, and UX designers specialize them into a set of templates the software developers can actually apply.
> It always bothered me that people got in the trouble of making a web-app, that generates designs, and those designs are not plain web pages.
Figma isn't a web app in the traditional sense of the word, it's a C++ app with a WebAssembly compile target. https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...
E.g., it's more similar to how Adobe Illustrator and other C++ graphics programs render content than it is how a web browser engine renders HTML and CSS.
That's an implementation details and doesn't answer the higher level product incongruency. Tool A, used to design for technology B, doesn't output files in technology B format. It's fine to point out that Tool a uses technology C under the hood, but that's the tail wagging the dog, and doesn't make sense, even if there's an explanation for it.
To address your point specifically though, Webflow is (at least from my perspective) the inevitable result of the line of thinking your pursuing. So I'd be curious what you think of Figma vs. Webflow, and why those two products have their relative market positions.
I.e., "Tool A, used to design for technology B, doesn't output files in technology B format. [...] doesn't make much sense".
E.g., why not just use Webflow then? From my understanding, that's what it does, that's what it's made for.
Sure, but I was interpreting the parent comment as implying the underlying technology was important to the output format:
> people got in the trouble of making a web-app
Seems to be missing quite a bit of the history. As many here mention there was an entire ecosystem of tools to convert PSDs to HTML such as CSSHat, Engima64, etc. and it's evolution into Avocode, Sketch, Zeplin, Invision Craft & Inspect and other preview/prototyping/inspect/export tools.
Eventually all roads led to Figma somehow, which honestly I would've never expected. Still surprised Figma became Sketch before Sketch could become Figma.
As others have pointed out, this should have been a showHN, but the article is vague enough that it wouldn't have garnered attention as a showHN. Furthermore, the post inflates the problems of design handoff to try and sell a no code editor environment. Yes, I'm aware that the platform enables coding capabilities, but plenty of no code tools can.
If you want to get into the shortcomings of Figma when it comes to hand off, I'm more than happy to have that conversation. Units that aren't valid in the CSS spec? Sure. Vector tools leading to things that are only achievable through clip path and masking? You bet. But claiming that designers and developers should have the same job when they're completely different skill sets and claiming that both roles are using the wrong tools to get the job done is no way to sell your product.
The problem as described:
> Designers would go into a design team and draw user interfaces. Developers would go into a dev team and write code. And thus, the hand-off was born.
Which is exactly what Figma solves and why it's so valuable.
Figma is the place where the UX team and dev team meet and discuss, specify design and behavior together through back and forth, and helps the dev team move from there with exactly what they need.
Nordcraft might want to be the next Figma, as it's apparently a lucrative position provided you execute incredibly and capture most of the market. But how they describe it they're not properly assessing or representing any of the current reality.
I kinda wonder what it would need to achieve to be significantly different from Figma. Perhaps if it was actually a whole production runtime where designers define front layers and the dev team codes binds them to a backend ? Basically a WordPress competitor ?
The Figma as a design space works better when the designers understand that constraints of HTML/CSS/JS animations. That's not often the case in reality (unless you hire around that idea).
I find many Figma designs basically force you to use fancy JS to assemble their UI designs. I know everyone uses React these days but you really shouldn't have to constantly write JS just to reproduce what's in a UI design. It creates so much needless dev and browser overhead.
Reading the other threads as well, I got the feeling it's more a culture or process problem than tooling per se.
The excessively fancy UI issue can be avoided if the devs enter the process at the prototyping phase. And Figma can be used for that: start with a wirefame and get everyone's input, comments, or even let the devs make counterpropositions (basically MRs?) by tweaking a copy of whatever screens are worked on. And as the design gets closer to reality the back and forth can continue in Figma.
That requires team collaboration and the willingness to build decent HTML/CSS in the first place, none of which are a given, but for teams working at that level it's a boon.
It works better in house for sure or with a good agency. There's a whole industry of fancy corporate design agencies that produce Figmas and developer-in-the-loop means going into lots of meetings with the consultancy managers and then waiting a week and a couple grand in hourly for them to produce something that needs to be fixed again.
But ignoring those fixable processes and hiring issues, there is plenty to be said about the new world of isolated islands of UI/UX designers, frontend, backend teams. I blame Javascript/React eating the world more than Figma. React/Vue opened up a whole hyper complex world of UI design and shit rolls downhill from UI->frontend->backend->users (mostly via performance/complexity).
How does this compare to something like Storybook?
can you use css in the design tool? a designer needs to learn some way of specifying layout and interactivity so it might as well be css
i wonder why it's so hard to find that they are based in Denmark if half their name is based on that ; sounds like an interesting project!
I didn't notice at first but it's one of those "blog post ads", concluding with "it's time".
Time for what? To click the "open app" button? Okay, so I clicked.
It doesn't open app. A button labelled "open app" should do what's on the tin. Instead it prompts for sign-up with terms and conditions warnings. I'm out.
Just open the app without sign-in! Why not? Too hard? Too scary? You can haggle for sign-up later. Let's see what you have right now, under the button labelled with a promise that I expect you to keep. Lying to me on page one is not a good start.
Here's an example of a web app that does it right. The button "start using Photopea" isn't a lie: https://www.photopea.com/
What the hell is this article talking about? Designers used to hand development teams PSD files. Or Illustrator files. Or, in the golden times, Fireworks files. Designers rarely handed us CSS and markup.
... did this person just start in the industry like three years ago?