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Discussion on: The tools I use, July 2018 edition 🛠

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Ali Spittel

Congrats on the CTO job!!!! I am also obsessed with Spectacle. Have you used Sketch before, if so how does it compare to Figma?

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Michael Lee 🍕 • Edited

Thanks Ali! 🙌🏼

Spectacle is sooo good right?

I have used Sketch before and thought it was the bees knees.

Figma is a powerful tool. For me what appealed to me is, it is web-based so it is agnostic to a specific OS which makes it is more accessible than other options. I think for most of what Sketch was providing me of putting together design for UI interfaces and vector based illustrations it is awesome. I have used it for creating icons, app interfaces and illustrations so it is versatile. Where it really shines is collaboration.

In my last team at CloudBees design, we had explored other options, Sketch being the tool they had used across the entire team. But as we were ramping up our UI architecture, advocating for a design led approach and figuring out ways for dev and design to have better hand off, Figma, although didn't do everything well, checked off enough marks for us to adopt as a team.

It was nice cause we got to consolidate tools by switching to Figma since we got real time collaboration, commenting, building prototypes and team shared components all in one app/service.

One draw back for me though was the web-based approach as well. Although the desktop app will generate a .fig extension for offline use, I do like working offline at times or am forced to work offline because of a lack of wifi. This made me nervous cause I wasn't sure if Figma would reconcile changes from two sources well; meaning offline file with cloud save.

But yeah if you haven't tried it out yet, totally encourage you to check it out!