Figma is a design tool that can be used for a wide range of activities from wireframes to prototyping to team collaboration.
It has rightly been making quite a splash in recent years, gradually stealing customers away from more established tools like Sketch, AdobeXD, and InVivision.
In this article, we take a closer look at Figma.
What is Figma?
Figma is a cloud-based tool for designing and designing user interfaces. As part of web design, you can actually master all the things in Figma before you get into coding/web design.
I’m not a UX/UI designer, so I can’t appreciate the breadth of this tool, but UX/UI designers are usually thrilled with Figma.
If you’ve never seen Figma, you can check out the trailer for Figma that came out a few years ago:
Figma tutorial
Figma is well known and widely used, and as such there are a number of tutorials on it.
In English, you can find the instructions here:
There are of course countless in English, one short one here:
The official YouTube channel of Figma is also definitely worth a look.
How much does Figma cost?
Figma is free. Unless you work in a large team, you can probably get by just fine with the free version:
However, Figma was recently (September 2022) bought, for a whopping $20 billion, by Adobe. So once the acquisition goes through, one would expect the price to change as well.
And based on Adobe’s policy, I wouldn’t expect such a friendly free plan to be maintained.
➕ Main benefits of Figma
- It’s free – and unless you work in larger teams, you can probably get by with the free version
- Teams can collaborate in real time
- Spread of features – UX, UI, prototyping, sketching…
- Community templates and various design packs
- Desktop app, which you can download here and which I can’t get enough of – I don’t even use Figma on the web
➖ The main disadvantages of Figma
- it took me longer to get the hang of it in the beginning compared to Invision or AdobeXD, but if you’re an experienced designer, you probably won’t have any problems
- If you don’t have a predefined app/web, you need the internet to create
- The recent acquisition by Adobe is a big unknown, and it’s likely that at the very least Figma will no longer be free
Word in conclusion
I’m not a designer. Not even close. However, for my needs (wireframes and the occasional image), Figma suits me just fine, and as the creatives discussed recently on the Creative Creatures podcast, Figma apparently suits the top of the Czech UX/UI scene as well.
This is why I think you should at least give Figma a try.
You won’t get anything for it (yet ) and you can judge it for yourself.
Let me know in the comments if you have any experience with Figma. Alternatively, do you use another tool for the same and are you excited about it?
