65. A Figma of Your Imagination

September 21, 2022

This week our heroes discuss the recent acquisition of Figma by Adobe for an obscene amount of USD. There may be lots of reasons to be weary of these developments, but losing a tool shouldn't be one of them.

Lots of designers were shook this past week to hear Adobe acquired Figma for a whopping $20,000,000,000.

That’s $20 Billion. With a B.

Last week, Jeremy wrote a quick post on LinkedIn that got a decent amount of traction. The post was about how designers shouldn’t focus on the tools. A designer’s job should be tool agnostic in that UX designers should be able to solve a user’s problem with any tool in our UX toolkit.

Figma is just one of many options we have for designing and prototyping. And while it is a very nice tool, there are many others that do a fine job of designing and prototyping.

Ultimately many people are upset about the ideals we might be losing with the acquisition of Figma by Adobe. Figma was the scrappy upstart with a lot of great ideas and really well executed to boot. The young scrappy underdog was scooped up by the Big Evil Mega Corp.

Only time will tell what Adobe will do with Figma. But if push comes to shove, we’re sticking with Axure.

Helpful Links:
Don’t base your career on a tool

Topics:
• 07:54 – Know what your tool is doing for you
• 08:30 – Why do we need a prototype?
• 10:24 – When your career revolves around a tool, the tool will always change
• 10:53 – You’re a good designer when you solve a problem for a user
• 12:10 – Should we talk tactics or concepts first?
• 14:37 – you can only learn so much in 6 months
• 15:22 – What comes first, hard or soft skills?
• 17:28 – Sometimes tools are applicable and sometimes they’re not.
• 23:43 – What if we taught boot camps around core concepts
• 27:33 – Lots of people are upset the philosophy of the Figma model is going away

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