J.Whiting.

Moving to Figma

In the last 6 months, I've moved to using Figma on a permanent basis. I'd spent a fair bit of time in and out of the beta, and now with the official launch, it feels more stable and ready for full time use than ever.

With I first tried Figma up it was a bit rough around the edges, it needed refinement and missed some of the fundamentals I was used to, such as Symbols (Sketch had tainted me). This is no longer the case, Figma is packed with handy tools for a solo designer or a team of designers.

The development from the Figma team has been outstanding, they keep iterating, improving and releasing new features. One of my favourite features has been the release of Team Libraries. When working on several different projects, within a team, I can have access to all the components my team or myself have created. This is super handy when using a consistent design style across multiple projects. Honestly, it's wicked!

Speaking of collaboration, Figma provides a solid collaboration work flow. I can send a link to anyone of my fellow designers, they can sign in and start editing, chopping and sometimes breaking my designs. It's as simple as sharing a link, no large files and no version fragmentation, all the changes are in one place (with version history 😱).

Did I mention version control? Being a developer at heart, this is so crucial to my workflow. I like to know that if myself or someone else makes something ugly, I can go ahead and find out why, undo it and go from there or just point fingers at who did and shame them.

Pricing wise, if you're just wanting to have a go at Figma and use it for your everyday projects it's completely free for a starter team. This will give you 3 projects with unlimited files. Wanting to ramp up the projects and use the team component library? You're looking at around $12 per editor/month. Honestly, this is a fair price for the amount of value you can get out of Figma and if you just want to try it give the Starter / Individual plan a try.

What are you waiting for? Give Figma a shot.