I went to a meet up here in Austin recently focused on designer using Figma to produce designs that then got made in Webflow.
Figma is kinda like Sketch except it is built in the browser.
Webflow is basically a design tool that uses React components to build websites.
The main advantage of Figma over Sketch is that it’s cross platform and being browser based can be easily collaborated one in the cloud.
Now, I would much prefer to recommend an open source tool to solve open source design problems but one should use the best tool for the job. Even Linus Torvalds has used non-FOSS IDEs before when he felt they made him more productive.
If nothing else I’d like to bring these two tools to the eyes of the open source community because I think their approaches could be a good model for open source projects attempting to solve design problems. Web technology is far more accessible to designers than something written in C++ and using QT for it’s GUI, and the cloud nature of Figma makes for an interesting possible solution to the problems that have been discussed in reference to source control and collaboration.
Questions for the forum to discuss:
Have you ever used Figma and what is your opinion of it’s source control solutions?
What design challenges does an open source alternative to Figma face that it’s closed source partner does not? (due possibly to the limited number of users with access to a project file at any particular point, or the fact that it’s file version history is centralized to a single branch with no ability to fork.)
What kinds of technological challenges does making an art/design tool face when built in the browser?
So far I actually never used them – just undo/redo and duplication of elements when I was trying something new.
I guess the “normal” challenges of open-source user-facing tools: It is hard to modularize usability/design and such a design-workflow and UI-heavy project seems often not very interesting to many who could develop it.
About forking I do not worry much, as I said above, I do not even use its build in version management. Looking at many other design tools, the idea that there should be git-like tools for design seems mainly like a concern of developers, less of designers themselves, so I do not see the absence of them as a problem.
As a follow-up to this thread on Figma, I came across the Figma Community blogpost.
It talks about open design - inclusive design. To quote:
Designers are opening up. They’re welcoming non-designers into their process. They’re co-editing with teammates. They’re sharing what they do and how they do it with the community.
They don’t explicitly mention open source, apart from this:
The Figma Community, releasing in beta, is a public space where you can now publish live design files that anyone in the world can inspect, remix, and learn from.
(my emphasis)
which I’ve interpreted as opening the designs if not the software built with the design. I wonder would they accept design pull-requests?
This is what they spoke about at Design Matters which was super awks because it was after I spoke about Open Source Design (here) and the Open Design project I’m involved in.
It’s cool they’re having a think about it but they were pretty shy in getting in the dirty details about open source, collaboration across skills gaps/borders/developing countries etc.
I reckon we could reach out for further conversations - though I don’t expect the same level of engagement I got from Adobe and the CEO of Sketch when I chat with both of those folks
It makes sense they’re a little gunshy since fundamentally they’re a SaaS business and that means their model is fundamentally built on a closed system relationship with its users.
Really wish we could see am open source equivalent but from what little I know of development that’s a pretty huge undertaking.
I was happy to see this. And I think it is more than a lot of other things we get when people talk about opening design: They did not only open the resources but also put on an actual open license.
It is as open as it gets in the space of design tools – neither Adobe nor Sketch seem to open their design tools either. If there is a company that is absent in those debates but should get more props imho, it is Balsamiq: They e.g. have clear structures of giving back to open source projects.
Right. I was surprised when I saw the licence applied to the designs.
[quote]
It is as open as it gets in the space of design tools – neither Adobe nor Sketch seem to open their design tools either.
I Balsamiq. I really do. But I wish they had a Linux application also.
My go-to design tool, after paper and pen, is Balsamiq (which means I need to keep my Mac OS machine). If it were available for Linux that’d be one less reason to keep the machine around.
)
Balsamiq. I really do. But I wish they had a Linux application also.