The5thElephant (u/The5thElephant)

The5thElephant commented on When Figma starts designing us designsystems.internation... · Posted by u/bravomartin

no_wizard · 8 months ago

as much as folks hate electron, I think if Figma was electron, it would at least have the entire chromium web engine to work with

The5thElephant · 8 months ago

Figma on desktop is an Electron app I believe. Figma chose to build a custom webGL rendering engine for their design canvas, so the core issue is that technical decision early on (probably allowed for some better performance and multiplayer back then). Figma is stuck with wanting to control their rendering and allow for non-product stuff like Figjam or the new Draw tools, but it will inherently hold them back from providing a really good design/dev handoff and always will hold designers back because it doesn't use CSS web rendering.

The5thElephant commented on When Figma starts designing us designsystems.internation... · Posted by u/bravomartin

miiiiiike · 8 months ago

No, here’s the problem: Figma doesn’t go far enough.

If you need a free form design tool to sketch, use one. There are hundreds of them.

I need to implement my design system inside of a design tool so I can prototype designs with multiple breakpoints, container queries, modes, and variants. Figma isn’t up to the job. Ever tried opening the variables tab on the Material 3 Figma file? Stutter, stutter, stutter, “this tab is unresponsive”. You can barely view a long variable list, forget editing one with multiple modes. And, I hope your variable names aren’t too long, because you’re not going to be able to see them in most parts of the UI.

The problem with Figma isn’t that it’s too engineer-y for designers, the problem is that it’s too designer-y for engineers. I spent a month implementing my design system in Figma before giving up and just doing it in code. With Figma you run into all of the downsides of building the design system in code (deeply nested items breaking when you move/change something) but you get none of the advantages.

Figma is a mound of half-baked (vaguely web-like) ideas, poorly implemented. So many times I’ve had things just stop working with no way to figure out why. 99% of the time it’s just a bug and you have to reload the app.

If there’s something better than Figma out there, please, let me know. For now I’m sketching in Figma and building my design system with extensions to Style Dictionary.

The5thElephant · 8 months ago

Exactly this. Thank you.

We need a Blender-like design tool specifically for product design. Using HTML/CSS for rendering so it covers most web needs and that usually more than encompasses native app-layout emulation. Open source, technical, and not expected to be picked up in a day or fully understood top-to-bottom by everyone.

The reason Figma is putting us into a design box is because it doesn't have all the CSS features that actually let you create incredible experiences.

The5thElephant commented on Figma files for proposed IPO figma.com/blog/s1-public/... · Posted by u/kualto

asoneth · 8 months ago

I agree with many of your statements but draw the opposite conclusion.

HTML and CSS are expressive, have a vast selection of libraries and tools, and can actually result in shippable code. Designers and front-end devs should learn and use it.

But I don't see the point in creating a design tool unless it's meaningfully simpler than HTML/CSS. I reach for Figma when I need to quickly mock up a dozen iterations using our design system and fancy rectangles. It's fast enough that I can make mockups in realtime during discussions with developers and subject matter experts. But if I'm actually going to take the time to set constraints to make things flex properly or make a real table then why not use HTML and CSS directly?

The5thElephant · 8 months ago

Because I can do way more meaningful design exploration and iteration if I am not constantly running into a tool's limitations. I work at a fast paced startup where my prototyping rapidly iterates into production and the vast majority of developers I have ever worked with don't really know CSS. If I want to implement something actually complex in layout it would be SO MUCH FASTER if I could show the devs how to do it in CSS correctly in the design tool. AND it would let me better test and explore how the complex layout interacts with real data and real users. Figma prototypes are terrible.

Figma is a great tool for 90% of basic and boring design. A lot of product design is not just basic and boring, and a lot of stuff I need simply cannot be reproduced in Figma. So yes I do just write the code directly, but that doesn't let me explore those complicated layouts and iterate on them visually the same way I could if it was HTML/CSS in a Figma-like design canvas.

The5thElephant commented on Figma files for proposed IPO figma.com/blog/s1-public/... · Posted by u/kualto

andrewmcwatters · 8 months ago

That sounds awful and after your comment, I'm glad I've stuck with Sketch.

The5thElephant · 8 months ago

Sketch has the same issue with handoff. Sketch does not use CSS for rendering either.

The5thElephant commented on Figma files for proposed IPO figma.com/blog/s1-public/... · Posted by u/kualto

soseng · 8 months ago

As a dev who only really uses the read-only version of Figma for the most part, I really like what they do. I can't speak for designers but having the Figma diagrams match the libraries and the design system we use is very very nice. no guessing about colors, typography, spacing. I can just copy and paste into my CSS for front end work. The interface is smooth and fast for us non-design focused devs

The5thElephant · 8 months ago

What about variables that don't use pixel units? Often values appear as hardcoded in dev-mode when they are actually meant to be a % unit or something else Figma doesn't support because Figma doesn't actually use CSS for rendering.

When my devs just copy whats in Figma dev-mode they get so much stuff wrong.

The5thElephant commented on Figma files for proposed IPO figma.com/blog/s1-public/... · Posted by u/kualto

dcchuck · 8 months ago

Congratulations to the Figma team! Well earned. It was such an exciting product when it hit the scene. It became the standard so fast, and it was easy to see why. When there were talks of them being bought for $20 billion I thought it was a great deal for Adobe - and that was before seeing these impressive financials.

I will admit I have waned enthusiasm a on Figma over the past couple of years. I find the UI churn confusing. The new features, i.e. dev mode and variables, feel out of place. I find the plugin ecosystem cumbersome. Doing simple things has become complex. I'm putting out real "who moved my cheese?" energy here I know. I suppose I'm wondering if others feel the same.

The5thElephant · 8 months ago

I actually have the opposite problem with Figma. It is way too basic and simple, targeting every kind of design and the average designer skill level.

I work in complex SAAS product design. Basic things I can do in CSS I can't do in Figma. Things like a table? Yeah it is entirely faked and awful in Figma. Don't even get me started on anything more complicated than flex rows and columns.

Half the debate over designer/dev handoff in the industry right now is simply because of Figma's limitations and the refusal of designers and front-end devs alike to learn HTML and CSS.

We need a Blender-like tool for web and app product design. Highly capable and advanced, you aren't expected to know all of it, and it can do anything you want it to.

I need a tool that is more than just a fancy rectangle drawer.

The5thElephant commented on Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation time.com/7285045/resignin... · Posted by u/jbegley

The5thElephant · 10 months ago

PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) would not have been possible without a completely unrelated discovery of a heat-resistant bacteria by a federally funded scientist years earlier. Is it possible that eventually a privately funded effort may have figured out that some bacteria can survive in temperatures beyond what was generally considered possible and connected that to replicating DNA? Yeah maybe, but it seems extremely less likely.

Your black and white way of looking at this is naive at face value. We need both federal and private funded research. Is there fraud in science? Yes. So your answer is throw it all out instead of rooting out the fraud? Somehow expect fraud not to exist in privately funded research? Your comments here are so myopically driven by a bias against something rather than what is the best outcome for scientific research.

The5thElephant commented on It Awaits Your Experiments rifters.com/crawl/?p=1151... · Posted by u/pavel_lishin

Atreiden · 10 months ago

This is one of the coolest things I've read here in some time. This is the kind of insanity I can get behind.

> The rest of us might think we achieve artistic immortality if our work lasts a century or three. Bök blows his nose at such puny ambitions. His work might get deciphered by Fermi aliens who finally make it to our neighborhood a billion years from now. It could be iterating right up until the sun swallows this planet whole.

I got frisson reading this. I may have to read the author's novels, his writing style is compelling.

The5thElephant · 10 months ago

Peter Watts is fantastic. Very different tone from a lot of other scifi, with some very clever and dark ideas.

The5thElephant commented on Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation time.com/7285045/resignin... · Posted by u/jbegley

jjtheblunt · 10 months ago

You didn't say what's wrong with ending up in industry, but mention it like it's bad?

The5thElephant · 10 months ago

Not doing basic research, and your research is entirely driven by short-term profit motives rather than long term benefit of humanity.

The5thElephant commented on New studies offer insight into Lyme disease’s treatment, lingering symptoms news.northwestern.edu/sto... · Posted by u/gmays

soulofmischief · 10 months ago

I literally used to get laughed out of the clinic, told I was a healthy young male and just needed to exercise more. After a decade of this, I was finally diagnosed with gout, something doctors had just been lying about testing for. No one could believe someone could have gout in their 20s (It's been developing since my late teens and I've generally had arthritis my entire life, since I was a child).

It took a physician's assistant, who happened to see me one day when both of my doctors were on their third extended vacation of the quarter, to hear my plight, take my suggestion of gout seriously, and do the leg work, also revealing to me that "full test panels" don't include uric acid by default and that my doctors had been lying to me about their thoroughness.

The assistant was also massively more knowledgeable about the disease, its history, the history of treatment, etc., and disease in general, than either of the two doctors running the clinic. Really opened my eyes.

The5thElephant · 10 months ago

Funny enough I also got diagnosed with gout once in my 20s. I have always had somewhat bad toes/bunions (probably partially genetic, and partially wearing only tight soccer shoes as a kid) and I went to a wedding wearing some new leather shoes that I hadn't broken in yet. The next day I woke up with a fever and horrific pain in the sides of my toes. Went to doctor and they did some tests and were also seemingly surprised at the results indicating gout. They asked me to come back in a week to double check, and by then my symptoms were gone and the tests no longer indicated gout.

Our bodies are such strange mechanisms.