I just saw this video come out this week. I haven’t kept up with Figma I’ve actually never used it. Even when it was getting hyped. When Adobe bought it I was afraid something like this might happen given Adobe’s terrible track record with web design.
I also haven’t used the latest beta of Sketch but the Sketch app seems to be catching up to (at least some) of the Figma advancements. I’ve been out of the Adobe ecosystem long enough I don’t even know if Dreamweaver is all Adobe has for the final website production?
I tried out Figma a few years back, but decided to stick with Sketch (as that’s where all my designs are). I’m glad I did, as it’s an excellent native Mac app and much better than working in a browser based app all day long
Adobe still has Dreamweaver (it’s included with my Adobe subscription), but I don’t know anyone that still uses it, or even talks about it!
I figured even if Figma was really good there might be a problem logging into my work at some point. It has happen to me before. Or what the the connection is slow or drops entirely? It’s too big of a risk. Then when Adobe bought I thought this can’t be good long term!
I’m not surprised by the output of Figma Sites — there have been quite a few “design” tools over the years that promise to export fully functional, well-coded websites. But in my experience, the code quality is usually pretty poor.
It’s definitely an appealing concept though — a design tool that automatically converts your layout into a working site. But the reality is, web development has a lot of nuance, and those details can get messy fast.
I think Elements strikes a really nice balance — giving you a powerful visual design environment and generating clean, semantic code behind the scenes.
Yeah, there are a many considerations I make before going from basic layout concept to a finished webpage. I have a vague memory of how someone could workup a layout in Fireworks but much of that work would be handed off to Dreamweaver before it got published.
Sketch is rolling two releases into one. Hopefully whatever they got behind in will be addressed now. I noticed one of the things they were working on was making the search bar more useful just like RealMac did with Elements. That will be fantastic to try out.
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