A decade ago, the digital screens we looked at every day were vastly different from the high-resolution displays we carry in our pockets and mount on our desks today. They were notably thicker, significantly wider, and physically tethered to walls by heavy cables. While mobile screens did exist in our pockets back then, they were not yet the insatiable vacuum cleaners for human attention that they have become in the modern era.
Today’s digital screens are lightyears ahead of the hardware we relied on in 2007, yet a surprising irony persists within the creative industry. Many of the fundamental software tools that graphic designers use to fill these modern screens with slick digital interfaces have barely evolved over the years. In fact, a vast number of industry professionals still rely heavily on Photoshop—the undisputed titan of graphic editing software that established itself as the industry standard long before the very concept of the iPhone existed—to design the look of your real-time Slack notifications and map out the visual architecture of your Instagram feed.
Over the past few years, however, a nimble crop of agile newcomers has emerged to woo frustrated graphic designers away from Adobe’s brawny, multi-purpose graphics editor. The most prominent among these challengers is a specialized tool called Sketch. Sketch offers many of the core features that made Photoshop famous, but it is fundamentally streamlined, easier to navigate, and purpose-built specifically for interface designers crafting apps and websites. The competition in the digital design software space has grown so fierce that Adobe was forced to respond, releasing a beta version of its own dedicated interface-design tool last year, titled simply Adobe Experience Design CC, widely known as Adobe XD.
To outsiders, this software rivalry might sound a little inside-baseball and perhaps even a bit dry. But this corporate and technical chess match involves high stakes because these tools are locked in an intense battle for the long-term loyalties of designers at today’s most powerful and influential technology companies. The designers choosing sides today will use the winning application to conceptualize, iterate, and develop the digital products that billions of people will interact with for years to come.
Today, that high-stakes melee grows even more interesting as a rising interface design tool called Figma takes a significant step toward the center of the ring. Figma is a browser-based application that empowers designers to conceptualize digital products as a cohesive group, allowing multiple team members to collaborate in real time as they simultaneously draw, drag, and edit visual elements on the screen. While Figma technically launched its public availability last September and has since quietly converted major players like Microsoft, Uber, and Slack into paying enterprise clients, the startup is not resting on its early success. Today, the young company unveiled two major, highly anticipated features that should give established market leaders like Sketch and Adobe serious pause—and will likely earn the upstart platform a few more heavyweight corporate logos for its trophy wall.
The first major enhancement is dubbed "code mode," a feature specifically engineered to give software developers direct access to the underlying code that dictates a project’s visual look and feel. The second addition is "prototype mode," which empowers designers to build, present, and modify fully functional, working prototypes of digital products directly within the application environment. Both modes operate entirely from inside Figma, a deliberate design choice intended to ease the friction and historic tensions that frequently emerge between creative designers and the code-minded engineers they must closely collaborate with to bring a product to life.
When it first launched to the public last year, Figma captured the design community’s attention primarily through two groundbreaking pillars: live, multi-user collaboration and robust version control. Much like the way multiple authors can work simultaneously within a single Google Docs file, an entire team of professionals can join forces on a single design project inside Figma at the exact same time. Every minor tweak, major revision, and layout edit saves immediately to the cloud, preserving a granular, detailed record of each project’s historical evolution and effectively preventing well-meaning collaborators from accidentally overwriting or erasing each other’s hard work.
This real-time, all-in-one digital environment represents a massive boon for design professionals who have historically been forced to rely on cobbled-together, multi-step workflows. Traditionally, these convoluted workflows involved bouncing back and forth between a dizzying array of standalone programs, third-party plug-ins, and external cloud storage services. Under the old paradigm, a designer might meticulously craft a mobile screen in Photoshop, save the finished file to the cloud using a service like Dropbox, and then generate a shareable link to that Dropbox folder to send to their project collaborators. Those collaborators would then be forced to download the file, make their own edits, and go through the exact same tedious series of steps just to return their revisions to the original creator.
The inefficiencies of the traditional workflow made live coordination nearly impossible, a pain point that Figma’s founders set out to eliminate entirely. The impact of this shift on everyday studio culture is already profound. Adam Simms, a product designer at Trello who utilizes the software to create custom extensions for his company’s widely popular project management application, recalls his first encounter with the platform vividly.
"The first time I used Figma was in a design review," Simms explains, describing how the tool has shifted his team’s daily operations. "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 collaborative advantages, collaboration is not Figma’s only strong suit in a crowded marketplace. Because it operates entirely as a browser-based application, it functions seamlessly regardless of whether your project collaborators are using high-end Apple Macs, traditional Windows PCs, or lightweight Linux laptops. By contrast, Adobe XD is restricted to running exclusively on Windows and Mac operating systems, while Sketch remains strictly tethered to the Mac ecosystem. On the other hand, established legacy platforms like Sketch and Adobe still hold distinct advantages in certain areas. Sketch benefits immensely from a mature, rich ecosystem of third-party plug-ins built by a dedicated community over many years, while Adobe leverages deep integration with its sprawling, ubiquitous suite of creative products alongside the company’s unmatched design heritage.
Regardless of which platform ultimately captures the lion’s share of the market, the most salient news to emerge from this ongoing corporate rivalry is that direct competition has spurred all of these companies to finally address workflow issues that have bedeviled digital designers for years. Yet, the broader battle for the hearts, minds, and daily workflows of Silicon Valley’s top-tier designers remains very much in its early days. The exact features that creative professionals will prize most in the long run, and which software vendor will manage to provide those critical capabilities first, is a story that is still actively being written.
