Dear Figma,
I still remember exactly how I felt walking into that industrial building with its high ceilings on my first day studying design. I was curious, excited, and couldn’t wait to embrace new tools to finally give my endless head of ideas a way to express themselves.
I opened up my brand new (way too expensive) MacBook we had to buy, and started downloading every design program I could find. They felt overwhelming and slightly stressful to start with. But as the years went by, I actually started to see patterns across tools, and I even enjoyed learning them.
But then Figma came along. And I immediately saw how the tool could enhance my design work even further. I found myself loving the way I could structure my design. And it was even reflected in the vacancies I applied to: if you wanted that UX designer job, you’d better be a Figma-wizard.
But if you think about it, it is weird to pair your skill as a designer with the mastery of one tool. Especially in a context that is ever changing and changing faster than tools at that scale ever can. And yet, there I was at their Figma Config, proudly wearing their merch, talking about how much I loved Figma. Their brand was tailored so perfectly to their target group. And yes, my Gen-Z (I don’t actually like talking in generations, but for the sake of your decreasing attention span, I’ll use it just this once) tendency to be obsessed with aesthetics clearly fell head over heels for it.
But then generative AI entered the building, and the cracks in our relationship started to show. It was like waking up and suddenly understanding: if you want to create cool things, the answer doesn’t necessarily have to be Figma.
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So Figma, yes I started using other tools again. Just like I did when I was eighteen and starting my whole design journey. I even felt excited to try other things again, to learn how they could help me design even faster. One of them was getting back into the world of code. The closer I got to the code, the faster I saw my ideas become the real thing.
(This is the part where I expose my AI-native UX design workflow 🫣)
The work I do is still the same at its core: visualizing ideas, crafting experiences that are convenient, needed, and functional. The means did not end. The tool did.
1. I still create a design library
Each screen I create is made up of building blocks, starting from buttons, all the way up to more complex widgets. Instead of using Figma to store them, I build them directly into code and use Storybook to manage them.
2. I still sketch out new components first
Buttons, dropdowns, and input fields can be reused from other projects. But sometimes a design problem is genuinely complex, and no existing component solves it yet. For those, I still sketch them out, just not in Figma anymore. I use Paper instead. Why? Because it is more lightweight than Figma, and it’s HTML and CSS based, which makes translating those sketches directly into my codebase far more token-efficient.
3. I still like to prototype my designs
Showcasing and gathering feedback is key to deciding on good design patterns. That’s true not just during sales (visualizing ideas for a client), but also during user testing, gathering real feedback before anything even reaches production.
Since my components already live in Storybook, and Claude artifacts are essentially HTML-based mini websites, I like building these prototypes directly in Claude artifacts. You could even push this further and put the prototype in its own branch in your codebase, which means it can go to production that much faster if it holds up.
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I hear you, Figma. I understand you might be sad. This doesn’t mean I’ll never use you again. Maybe time changes and we change too, and we’ll work this out together again. But I want to be free, and I’ll never let nice marketing or good branding (read: good looks) distract me anymore from the results I could actually deliver.
I hope you understand me.
Lots of love,
Amber
