I Skipped Figma to Write This

On tooling, identity, and the panic of losing the one skill we thought defined us

We heard that right: everybody is talking about skipping Figma to do everything now, maybe also to do their laundry, and at this point I genuinely wouldn’t be surprised if someone tried.

I know they’re talking about design process. Specifically, when they go through their product design process, because that’s where the conversation keeps circling back to.

Usually how it’s done is that designers start with discovering the problem, then iterating on it, testing it with real people, iterating again based on what they learned, and somewhere along the way there’s a formal handover to engineering where you package everything up and hope for the best. You might also want to measure the impact at some point, somehow, with whatever tool makes sense for your context: NPS, a survey, another round of research, whatever gets you the signal you need.

Oh, is what you’re saying that there should always have been Figma in the middle of all that? That Figma is the core skill that every designer has to use, the thing that ties all of those stages together?

Sorry, I thought design has always been less about what we use and more about how we think through problems for people. But I understand the argument, I really do. It’s sort of an industry standard at this point, so that everywhere you go it should be used, because team workflow is the number one priority and you really can’t be the only person on the team not using it. That’s fair. Collaboration needs a shared space, and when everyone is in Figma, you should be in Figma too.

Did I hear someone at the back say it was Sketch before that? Yes, indeed, what a nostalgia. I remember the cult of Sketch plugins, the way people swore by it, the way it felt like the answer to everything Adobe had gotten wrong. We loved Sketch the way we love Figma now, which is to say completely and without questioning whether the love was really about the tool or about belonging to the group that used it.

Oh, did I also hear from the very back that some of you used Adobe Photoshop in the heydays? Designing interfaces in Photoshop, layer by layer, exporting assets at 2x because retina had just become a thing? I remember that too. I lived that. And at the time, that was the skill. That was the thing you put on your resume, the thing interviewers expected, the thing that separated the “real” designers from everyone else.

So now things are changing again, because Claude Code (yeah, among many other AI tools and platforms) apparently walked into the bar one evening and started trying to change people’s minds, advocating for itself to be the de facto industry standard, the unmissable tool that everybody now has to learn whether they asked for it or not. And suddenly there are designers writing .md files to describe systems and flows, and the .md files are producing working prototypes faster than most of us can set up a component with the right auto-layout constraints.

You mean to tell me that in the not-so-distant future, the same people who once smirked at designers without Figma skills will be smirking at designers without Claude Code skills? That the same sideways glance, the same polite concern, the same “oh, you don’t use...” energy will simply transfer to a new tool and carry on as if nothing changed?

And that now .md files are somehow baked into the double diamond, that they should appear in every designer’s case study as proof of competency, the same way Figma screenshots do today?

I don’t know. What about being agnostic with tooling and focusing on the problem at hand? I’ve heard this sentiment too, many times actually, and honestly it sounds more refreshing than I initially gave it credit for. The idea that the process is the process, and the tool is just whatever helps you move through it with the least friction and the most clarity.

Or maybe the more uncomfortable question is this: did we, as a design industry, anchor ourselves too much on Figma as a skill? Did we confuse mastery of a tool with mastery of a craft, and build an identity around something that was always going to be temporary?

I should confess something here. I am an old school designer who hates being told what to do, so naturally, when some Figma ninja in whatever company I happen to join starts judging and closely teaching me how to organise my auto-layout very strictly, with very specific opinions about naming conventions and nesting hierarchies, I just smile. I smile the way you smile when someone is being very passionate about something you find only mildly important. I respect the discipline, but I also know that the auto-layout will not be the thing that makes or breaks the experience for the person using what we build.

So what’s really happening here? Are we panicking, or in a state of euphoria for those who secretly hated the Figma-first orthodoxy, that Figma is no longer the undisputed baseline tool we start everything with? Is the anxiety really about the tool, or is it about losing the one skill we had come to associate so deeply with the act of designing that we forgot they were two separate things?

Or are we doing the more grounded thing, which is sticking to the fact that design process is a process, one that acknowledges the tools, respects the tools, but only reaches for those that are relevant or potentially more beneficial to the work at hand? Because if that’s the case, then Claude Code isn’t a threat to Figma any more than Figma was a threat to Sketch, or Sketch was a threat to Photoshop. It’s just another thing that walked into the room and asked to be useful.

The interesting part is not the tool. The interesting part is whether we’ve learned anything from the last three times this happened, or whether we’re going to build another identity around another tool and act surprised when the next one shows up and the smirk starts all over again.

I’d like to think we’ve learned. But then again, I’ve been smiling at auto-layout lectures for years now, so what do I know.