A decade ago, the screens that captured our attention were fundamentally different objects. They were thicker, wider, and firmly tethered to office walls or living room desks. Though mobile devices were beginning to find their way into our pockets, those early smartphone screens were not yet the relentless, omnipresent magnets for our eyes that they have become today.
While today’s digital displays are light-years ahead of the hardware we carried in 2007, many of the foundational software tools that graphic designers use to fill those screens with digital interfaces have remained remarkably static. In fact, a surprising number of professionals still rely heavily on Photoshop—an application that has reigned as an industry standard since long before the birth of the iPhone—to design everything from the look of modern push notifications to the complex structural layout of an everyday social media feed.
That traditional dominance, however, has faced mounting pressure over the past few years. A nimble crop of software newcomers has emerged, actively working to woo graphic designers away from Adobe’s brawny, multi-purpose graphics editor. The most prominent early challenger is a dedicated application called Sketch, which successfully packages many of Photoshop’s most useful features into a more streamlined, approachable interface built specifically with digital product designers in mind. The competition has grown so fierce that industry giant Adobe was forced to react, releasing a beta version of its own purpose-built interface design tool, straightforwardly named Adobe Experience Design CC, or Adobe XD.
To outsiders, this software rivalry might occasionally sound a little inside-baseball and perhaps even a bit dry. But beneath the technical jargon lies a high-stakes corporate battleground. These tools are currently locked in a fierce contest for the long-term loyalties of designers at some of the world’s most powerful technology companies—designers who will use the winning application to conceptualize, build, and refine the digital products utilized by millions of people for years to come.
That ongoing melee took a significant step toward the center of the ring today as Figma, an innovative interface design tool, rolled out major updates designed to expand its capabilities. Unlike its desktop-bound rivals, Figma is a browser-based platform that allows designers to build digital products collaboratively. It enables multiple team members to work together in real time, drawing, dragging, and editing user interface elements directly on a shared canvas. Since its official launch last September, the startup has quietly converted several corporate heavyweights into paying clients, including major names like Microsoft, Uber, and Slack. But the release of two crucial new features—dubbed "code mode" and "prototype mode"—should give established competitors like Sketch and Adobe serious pause, while likely earning the young startup a few more high-profile companies for its growing client roster.
The first of these major enhancements, code mode, gives software developers direct, view-only access to the underlying code that dictates a project’s precise look and feel. The second addition, prototype mode, allows designers to construct, present, and modify fully functional, working prototypes of digital products without ever leaving the application. Both modes are built directly into Figma’s core environment, a strategic choice explicitly intended to ease the traditional friction and communication barriers that frequently emerge between creative designers and their code-minded engineering collaborators.
When Figma first launched to the public last year, it immediately captured the attention of the design community by introducing two headline features: live collaboration and integrated version control. In much the same way that multiple users can log into a Google Doc to type and edit text simultaneously, numerous individuals can now join forces on a complex visual project within Figma. Every tweak, adjustment, and design edit is saved immediately to the cloud. This preserves a comprehensive, detailed record of each project’s evolutionary history and prevents collaborators from accidentally overwriting or erasing each other’s hard work.
For working design professionals, this real-time, all-in-one digital environment represents a massive professional boon. For years, the industry has relied on cobbled-together, inefficient workflows that forced teams to juggle multiple standalone programs, browser plug-ins, and third-party cloud services just to share a single concept. A typical workflow might involve designing a screen layout in Photoshop, saving the file to the cloud using a service like Dropbox, and then emailing a link to that shared folder out to collaborators. Those colleagues would then be forced to download the assets, make their own adjustments, and go through the entire cumbersome routine in reverse just to share their revisions back.
The operational shift that real-time collaboration brings to a team is profound, according to industry practitioners. Adam Simms, a product designer at Trello who uses Figma to build extensions for his company’s widely used project management software, recalls his initial experience with the platform vividly.
"The first time I used Figma was in a design review," Simms explains, describing how he shared his work with his technical colleagues. "I sent ten developers a preview link to my project, and they all jumped into a live demonstration of the design. When they realized they were looking at the source files, and they could follow me around on screen, the experience completely changed. It turned into this interactive feedback loop, where they were able to comment on things as I was going through them."
Collaboration, however, is not Figma’s only competitive advantage in the crowded design software market. Because it operates entirely as a browser-based application, it functions smoothly regardless of whether a team’s members are using Apple Macs, Windows PCs, or Linux laptops. By contrast, desktop applications carry platform limitations; Adobe XD runs exclusively on Windows and Mac systems, while Sketch remains strictly limited to macOS users.
On the other hand, established heavyweights like Sketch and Adobe still retain distinct strengths of their own. Sketch benefits deeply from a mature, rich network of third-party plug-ins built by a loyal developer community, while Adobe leverages its legendary, decades-long heritage in the design space alongside deep integration with its broader suite of creative software products.
Regardless of which platform ultimately claims market dominance, the most salient news for the industry is that this intense commercial competition has spurred all major players to directly address the frustrating workflow bottlenecks that have bedeviled digital designers for years. Even so, the broader battle for the hearts, minds, and daily workflows of Silicon Valley’s top creative talent remains firmly in its early days. Which specific features designers will ultimately prize the most, and which company will manage to deliver them first, is a question that the tech industry is still actively figuring out.
