A decade ago, the screens we interacted with every day were very different objects. They were noticeably thicker, wider, and physically tethered to walls or heavy desk setups. While mobile screens did exist in our pockets back then, they were far more modest in scope and certainly not as hungry for our constant attention as modern smartphones are today. The digital landscape has since undergone a massive, structural transformation, evolving at a pace that has completely reshaped how humanity communicates, works, and consumes media.
Yet, paradoxically, many of the core tools that graphic designers use to fill these advanced screens with digital interfaces have remained largely unchanged for years. In fact, a surprising number of creative professionals continue to rely heavily on Adobe Photoshop—an application that has served as the undisputed industry standard since long before the introduction of the iPhone—to design everything from the look of modern Slack notifications to the intricate layout of an Instagram feed. Photoshop is undeniably powerful, but it was originally built for photo retouching and print media rather than the fluid, dynamic world of modern software interfaces.
In the past few years, however, a nimble crop of newcomers has emerged with the express purpose of wooing graphic designers away from Adobe’s brawny and sometimes cumbersome graphics editor. The most prominent early disruptor in this space is a specialized tool called Sketch. Offering many of the core features that made Photoshop famous, Sketch is significantly easier to navigate and was specifically engineered from the ground up with interface designers in mind.
The competition in this software category has become so fierce that tech giant Adobe was forced to respond. Last year, the company released a beta version of its own purpose-built interface-design tool, carrying the straightforward name Adobe Experience Design CC, more commonly known as Adobe XD.
This ongoing struggle may sound a little inside-baseball, and perhaps even a bit boring to those outside the tech industry. But when considered more deeply, these software tools are actually locked in a high-stakes battle for the absolute loyalties of the designers working at today’s most powerful and influential companies. The designers choosing sides today will use the winning application to develop the digital products, mobile applications, and web services that millions of people will interact with for years to come.
Today, that intense corporate melee gets significantly more interesting as an interface design tool called Figma takes a major step toward the center of the competitive ring. Figma is a browser-based tool designed to help digital product teams build applications as a cohesive group, enabling multiple people to collaborate in real time as they draw, drag, and edit visual elements directly on the screen together.
Figma technically launched last September, and in the months since its debut, the startup has managed to secure paying clients out of major industry players like Microsoft, Uber, and Slack. But today, the young company is unveiling two key features that should give established competitors like Sketch and Adobe serious pause—and will likely earn the startup a few more prominent enterprise names for its growing trophy wall.
The first major enhancement is a capability known as "code mode," which gives software developers direct, streamlined access to the underlying code that defines a project’s look and feel. The second new addition is "prototype mode," a feature that lets designers build, present, and modify working, interactive prototypes of digital products without needing to export files to external platforms. Both of these new modes function directly from inside the Figma application, a strategic product choice intended to ease the traditional tensions that frequently emerge between visual designers and the code-minded engineers they must collaborate with to bring a product to life.
When it first launched to the public last year, Figma immediately captured the attention of the design community with two groundbreaking features: live collaboration and advanced version control. Much like the way multiple users can work together simultaneously inside a Google Docs file, numerous people can join forces on a single design project inside Figma at the exact same time. Minor tweaks and major edits save immediately to the cloud, preserving a detailed, chronological record of each project’s history and keeping busy collaborators from accidentally overwriting each other’s hard work.
This real-time, all-in-one digital environment is a major boon for professional designers, who have historically been forced to rely on cobbled-together workflows involving multiple distinct programs, unstable plug-ins, and various cloud storage services. Under the traditional workflow, a designer might carefully craft a mobile screen in Photoshop, save the resulting file to the cloud using a service like Dropbox, and then share a web link to that Dropbox folder with their project collaborators. Those collaborators then have to go through the exact same tedious steps just to share their revisions and counter-proposals back with the original designer.
Design professionals are already seeing the practical benefits of this unified approach in their day-to-day work. Adam Simms, a product designer at Trello who uses the tool to create extensions for his company’s popular project management application, recalls his first impression of the software vividly.
"The first time I used Figma was in a design review," Simms says. "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."
Despite these collaboration advantages, Figma is not without its limitations, and it is certainly not the only strong suit in the modern design ecosystem. Because Figma is entirely browser-based, it functions smoothly whether your collaborators are using Apple Macs, Windows PCs, or Linux laptops. By contrast, Adobe XD is currently limited to Windows and Mac operating systems, while Sketch remains strictly Mac-only.
On the other hand, established heavyweights like Sketch and Adobe still hold distinct advantages in other areas. Sketch benefits immensely from a rich, mature network of third-party plug-ins built by a loyal community over many years. Adobe, meanwhile, boasts seamless integration with the broader suite of Adobe creative products, not to mention the company’s decades-long design heritage and deep enterprise relationships.
Regardless of which specific platform ultimately wins out in the long run, the most salient and positive news for the creative industry is that fierce market competition has spurred all of these companies to finally address persistent workflow issues that have bedeviled digital designers for years. However, the broader battle for the hearts and minds of Silicon Valley’s top designers is still in its early days. Exactly which features these professionals will prize most, and which software company will manage to provide them first, is a question that the tech industry is still actively figuring out.
