Getting rid of Figma

How and why we changed our design process

When I started my career as a designer, Figma didn’t exist. I mocked up UI designs in Adobe Illustrator and shared them in Keynote. Every time a client needed a change I would have to start all over again, which was a messy and painful process.

We’ve come a long way since then. Designers now collaborate in real time on infinite canvases. Our work saves automatically and has a version history. And handover is much easier! Figma has their developer mode so they can use the same files that we do without any extra legwork. Or at least, that’s what I thought.

I started working as a design engineer and got to see things from the other side. Oh boy, it’s not pretty.

At my new company Vouchsafe, the team were using Figma because that’s what they’d always done. To test my frontend skills I attempted to build a component we didn’t have in our codebase yet. But it was so hard to translate between the two. Our team uses Tailwind but the Figma design system used a different naming convention for colours.

The Figma sinkhole

At one point, I needed to design a new card component. I spent ages creating the new components in Figma but I then had to build them again in the codebase anyway. I realised that I was wasting…