If you had told me five years ago that I would have so much as an unflattering thought about Figma, I would have questioned your grip on reality. I wasn’t a casual user. I was a preaching convert. The kind that judged other designers for still using Sketch.
Full disclosure, this isn’t really a breakup letter. It is something more uncomfortable than that. It is the conversation you have with someone (or something) you genuinely love when you realize the relationship was built for a version of yourself that doesn’t exist anymore.
I came up on Photoshop. The OG. Back when the canvas didn’t move. Before Save for Web was “legacy.”
The Adobe suite was not just software to me. It was the language I learned design in. So when Adobe started forcing everyone toward Creative Cloud between 2013 and 2015, quietly burying perpetual licenses one version at a time until CS6 was the last thing you could actually own, it felt less like a pricing decision and more like a middle finger. These were tools I had built my profession around. Adobe decided the terms of that relationship were changing and I didn’t get a vote.
Then Adobe XD showed up, and I was willing to believe again. It had the scent of a redemption arc. A design tool built for application designers. I was cautiously excited.
Then came Figma.
I am genuinely in awe of what Figma has become. Dylan Field, to me, is what Steve Jobs must have been to an iPhone developer in 2008. Though you knew you were building on someone else’s platform, you couldn’t help but be mesmerized by the new potential. You knew the constraints were not yours to set. But you also knew the person holding the vision had something most people in the industry simply did not - a genuine understanding of what the craft required, and the courage to build toward it without apology.
But for me, what Figma got right was this: a design prototype with a heartbeat.
Before Figma, I was duct-taping tools together. Photoshop or Illustrator for design elements, Sketch or Balsamiq for the composite design, InVision for the prototype. What came out the other end was kind of a janky flipbook - a static file dressed up to simulate life. InVision was remarkable for its moment but limited in ways that felt almost pretentious.
Figma was not pretending. The precise framing, repeatable component and styling usage, prebuilt device canvases, the scroll simulation, the layout and animation controls, the ability to build something and share a link that a user could actually feel - that was a category shift. I could hand someone a URL and they could experience something close to the real product. That changed everything about how I designed and how I communicated with stakeholders.
I was immediately and completely hooked. For a long happy while.
Then Adobe announced the acquisition of Figma.
That hit differently. This was not just my favorite underground alt band cashing in and going radio, or a product finding a bigger home. This was the same suitor company that had already burned me once, coming back for the tool that replaced the tool they ruined. It felt predatory in a visceral kind of way. When the deal fell through I joined the many in a mild sigh of relief.
But a cynical question was planted about the real fate of all great products - must they all become machinery of capitalism, must they grow in perpetuity at all costs?
Admittedly, it’s kind of a naive rhetorical question, but to me, Figma Make is a partial answer. It’s beautiful. The first release was a little premature but showed us a glimpse of the awesome power of harnessing AI in the design suite. It is genuinely amazing now and an extremely valuable accelerant.
It feels to me, though, like a product designed for a design team inside a company that already has designers, developers, a handoff process, and the luxury of iteration cycles measured in weeks rather than days.
I am a founder now, leading a small team that has built three enterprise applications used by Fortune 500 companies, with over $200 million in transaction volume - all designed in Figma.
But the question I am living with every day is not “which tool produces the most refined output.” The question is: what can help us go from product idea to user feedback the fastest? Because at our stage, speed to validation is the only competitive advantage that matters. Everything else is overhead.
On that metric and with a genuinely broken heart, Figma finishes in 2nd place.
When I prototype in a Claude chat session with my design system locked in for context, I get something Figma Make can’t do - yet. I get a prototype that doesn’t simulate a working application. It is a working application. Real state management. Real conditional logic. Real interactions.
Figma built something that changed how I practice design. I am still using it, and I still believe in it. The Figma MCP integration with Claude Code is a great response to a rapidly shifting landscape. The bidirectional pipeline from code to canvas is incredibly useful for teams at the right stage of development. But I don’t design iteratively in Claude Code, nor can I migrate from Figma Make to a design file canvas.
In Figma Make, I am doing that screen by screen. Copy. Paste. Repeat. Across every frame in the flow. I have genuinely considered building an agent that logs into my Figma Make account and automates that copy-paste process just to get back to a whole source of truth that I know I’ll eventually, really need. Should I be?
Figma taught me in 2019 that the prototype that wins the feedback race is not the most beautiful one. It’s the one that is most alive. I have not forgotten that lesson. So, we are taking a break for now. I’m secretly hoping we don’t just grow apart.