Figma Question

[Carlisle1500]

Can someone talk about this acquisition of Figma? Is XD dead?

See attached

[Joseph Labrecque · Accepted solution]

We have no idea how this will play out. 

[Carlisle1500]

They are paying $20 billion for this firm.

[Joseph Labrecque]

Certainly sounds insane. 

[Carlisle1500]

They must either have tons of customers or an awesome portfolio of products.

[Pedro24763177u2fg · Accepted solution]

They are just buying their competitor, easier than improving their product.

[Carlisle1500]

So much for DevOps "Velocity..."

[Peter Villevoye · Accepted solution]

They have Figjam and Figma, two incredibly great tools for collaborative whiteboarding, UI design, and prototyping. These tools are far more advanced, stable, reliable, and feature-rich, compared to Adobe XD (plus Whiteboard plug-in). Apart from XD's jaw-dropping Repeat Grid (with auto-alternating content), they offer everything Adobe XD does (and sooo much more), but quicker, better, more elegant and efficient.

[War Unicorn · Accepted solution]

They did say support for XD won't end. I have to believe both will merge into one super-duper UX app.

(FigmaD? Xigma?) xD

It's all speculation, of course. I wonder what Figma users are thinking right now, though.

[Chris W. Griffith · Accepted solution]

My guess is we might have file interop between XD and Figma. If we are lucky some other sharing functionality. 

[Carlisle1500]

Maybe we'll get lucky and Adobe will rename it Figma XD or XD Figma so we get mileage out this XD certification, lol. I notice this cert is no longer available for users now.

-> I now have the ability to edit my replies now (Yeah!!)

[Peter Villevoye]

Of course Adobe will tell us support for XD won't end – soon. But the better tool will survive, and that's certainly not XD ! They will plan a smooth file migration to Figma, and to do that Figma will probably implement some kind of Repeat Grid feature (with auto-alternating content) and maybe slap CC Libraries to it. For the rest, I can't think of any feature XD has which Figma lacks. As a matter of fact, Figma offers sooo much more features and refinements...

[Spas K. · Accepted solution]

Only thing Figma is missing compared to Xd is Video and Lottie (although they do support GIFs, they are pretty inefficient). Another thing - Xd allows for some hacks to simulate a sticky navigation, which due to the way fixed elements work in Figma, are impossible to achieve in the same way.

So if they add Video / Lottie to Figma and (proper) sticky functionality / scroll trigger - I personally don't need anything else.

[Peter Villevoye]

https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/809860933081065308/LottieFiles

[Peter Villevoye]

Do you have a sample showing the 'stickiness' you need ?

[Spas K.]

Hey, yeah, that Lottie plugin still converts to gif though, but anyways, had some projects where I need to show a fullscreen video and I think the native support of it from Xd will be a great addition to Figma.

On the stickiness - I got a tutorial on how to simulate it in Xd for navigation bars (doesn't look great with taller elements). In Xd that's achievable because fixed elements can be below scrolling layers, so you can have some cover that hides the navigation and reveals it as you scroll past a certain point.

In Figma, fixed layers are ALWAYS on top of everything else, in a separate stack for each frame, so you can't hide them behind scrollable content.

The way people've been hacking it in Figma is with an element that opens the nav as an overlay on 'mouse over', but for it to work the cursor needs to stay at the same location. It's far from intuitive or realistic, and doesn't work for me.

[Peter Villevoye]

The description states that you can also add Lottie files as high quality SVG:

Add a high quality SVG animation layer:

1. Drag and drop your Lottie or select a free one from the LottieFiles library

2. Using the player bar, select the animation frame you want to insert

3. Click ‘Insert as SVG’

Anyway, native support for After Effects and/or Lottie files might become easier, now that Figma has direct access to any native resources (which are somethimes also a legal matter, not just technologies).

[Spas K.]

That "high quality SVG layer" is just one static frame from the lottie animation. I already created the elements in Figma. Another issue is that the lotties I made have linked raster assets (unavoidable, product photos), that work with the lottie-web plugin, but aren't detected by that LottieFiles plugin for Figma. Haven't tried if Xd will detect them.

If I used video it would have been a minimum of 2-3mb, and the background would have been solid. With lottie and webp I managed to bring that around 160kb for a 10 sec animation, and it supports transparency since it's SVGs and WEBP.

If I had the ability to send all graphics (vector and raster) directly to AE and import the .json after animating directly to Figma as a looping graphic, that would've been great. I didn't use Xd for multiple reasons, but Figma's vector handling is far superior.

My workflow was to create the graphics (mixed raster and vector elements) into Figma. Then copied vectors as SVG over to Illustrator so I can get them into AE as paths, and export .webp for the raster elements, since the file size is probably 1/3 of that for PNGs. Then I could finally export the whole animation as .json for the devs to use, but it was easier to showcase it directly as video from AE.

Let's hope we'll get more efficient workflows for this, although my use case is probably pretty uncommon 🙂

[Earth Oliver · Accepted solution]

Sounds to me like XD will soon no longer be. From an email this morning:

Dear Valued Customer,

We're writing to share some exciting news we announced today. Adobe has entered into a definitive merger agreement to acquire Figma, a leading web-first design platform for teams who build products together.

Figma and FigJam make it possible for all stakeholders designing interactive mobile and web applications to collaborate through multi-player workflows, sophisticated design systems and a rich extensible developer ecosystem.

While we have been reducing our investment in XD, we will continue to support it. We are excited about Figma's vision for the future of product design and the potential of our teams coming together to benefit our customers. After the transaction closes (expected in 2023), we will share more information.

[Earth Oliver]

and if you're wondering why they're acquiring for 20B:

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/25/figma-growing-inside-microsoft-testing-longtime-deal-with-adobe.html

What a shame. Adobe had how many years to get XD right? So much for competition creating innovation at Adobe. Better to just consume the competition instead.

[Carlisle1500]

Figma has a great portfolio but Adobe needs to rebrand to Figma XD or XD Figma so we can ensure our investments last as long as possible. It's painful & expensive to remodel a business. If you rebrand to one of the above, we can smoothly add their portfolio and keep up with Adobe. Hybrid!!!

[Peter Villevoye]

My 2 cents: Figma might remain a brand within Adobe, just like https://www.behance.net/. 

[Wednesday Dessauer · Accepted solution]

My hot take without all the facts:

Figma & XD aren't well differentiated enough to make a clear path for running them in parallel indefinitely. When they say 'we will continue to supportt XD' while 'reducing our investment in XD' it sounds similar to what they've done with Adobe Dimensions since introducing the Substance Suite. The difference is that as the premium product, Figma would have to become a subscription (?). 

I'm having flash backs of when Adobe acquired Macromedia. They mainly wanted Flash I think, but Dreamweaver replaced GoLive!, which I was actually using at the time. On the other hand, I had already jumped ship from Freehand to Illustrator, which was the survivor there. That precedent makes me think they would be pragmatic in siding with Figma (which the valuation shows that they acknowledge they can't out conpete) rather than contemplating killing it. I think it has a larger user base still, so not annoying them will be the major challenge.  

I guess now we need to wait to see what the XD team say at MAX on their future roadmap, but I fear that 'continue to support' is just a stepping stone towards the fate of Adobe Muse which remained ignored for the years until they quietly shut it off with the fewest complaints. 

Not only do I use XD, I have class loads of students and a growing catalogue of training resources invested in it. I'm ok with changing ship, as I say, I've done it before... but a little more clarity from Adobe on this would sure help me plan my future training and start building that out. 

[Wednesday Dessauer]

Maybe I should add, when they do run out an app in favour of another, they have rolled in features. Like I think Illustrator got Freehands auttrace engine (?). So people here talking about a super app Adobe FigmaXD are probably not wrong. It's gonna upset the Figma purists, but I think they are already looking at jumping to Pen;or and others. Seems premature when honestly no one seems to know where this is headed yet. 

[Wednesday Dessauer]

^Penpot #autocorrect