figma is not reality.
there, i said it. and it will live on here for the end of time. okay, enough dramatics. here goes.
figma is probably one of the best pieces of software to come out of silicon valley in the past decade. no doubt. what a tool. to design, prototype, ideate, present, collaborate. it started as a way to bridge the gap between design and engineering, to smooth out the ambiguity around things that needed a better way to be visualised. "what's the size of this button?" has grown into conditional logic, component variants, design systems that a whole team can work with. and even with all of that, it feels like it's only just begun to scratch the surface.
i've been using figma for about 8 years. started with graphic design, moved into product, then used it for service design during my masters, and now i'm a SPD at putting scene, an event curation platform based in our beloved Bengaluru. 40k+ people across 28 whatsapp groups, all finding things to do in a city that has a lot going on and almost no good way to discover it. that's the problem we're solving. and design is how i think about solving it.
and for a loooong time, i genuinely believed that if it looked right in figma, it was right. 'the file' was the product. 'the prototype' was 'the experience'. if i could make it feel seamless in a click-through, we were good. right?!?!
we were NOT good.
early this year, while all any one could think or talk about was AI and AI had in fact peaked across the globe and everyone was losing their minds about what it meant for, well, everything, my design mentor Sunit, 30 years in the industry, came in for one of our weekly sessions and said something i wasn't prepared for.
"figma is pointless now yaar".
not dismissively. not dramatically. just. stated it. and then showed me why. tools like Lovable, Cursor, Claude code, can rapidly prototype in ways that feel real because they are real. not just a click-through. but actually running one's and zero's beneath it. real hidden constraints you'd never have accounted for with figma screens alone. something alive, to get the feel of what you're trying to build before you've committed to building it. so he wasn't dismissing the hours designers spend in figma. he was saying the process isn't the same anymore. and, he was right.
so i did what anybody else would have done and looked around. here's a gist what the the broader conversation in the industry looked like. [1] [2]
so i started paying attention, differently. and then a few weeks later, Pratul, our head of product and engineering, made it impossible to pay attention any other way.
i was showing our engineer Abhimanyu a prototype. pointing things out. and i said, casually, as i had said a thousand times before in a thousand different design reviews: "yeah, make that button's height 4pixels higher."
Pratul heard it. and he called me out. like really.
and rightfully so. what does 4pixels even mean in code? in frontend code, when you're writing what a button looks like and how it behaves, what does "4px higher" mean and where does it go and what does it touch? i didn't know. i had never needed to know. i had been designing for 4 years and nobody had ever asked me to think about what my figma file would actually transcribe to on the other side. not at my previous roles, definitely not in my masters, not anywhere. (why? that's a whole other conversation altogether.) but, figma doesn't know about any of that.
figma is living its best life, unbothered, in a consequence-free universe. everything is possible in figma. spacing is perfect. interactions are smooth. there is no such thing as "the library doesn't have that function" or "that'll take three sprints" or "what does 4px even mean." basically, figma does not have a Pratul.
reality has a Pratul.
and i'm genuinely glad it does.
because that moment sent me somewhere i hadn't expected to go. i started trying to actually understand what frontend code looks like. not to become an engineer. but to "design like someone who understands and knows fully where her designs are going to land". understanding API endpoints, engineering scope, what's actually buildable versus what's ideal in my head. if you think about it, it doesn't make you any less of a designer. in fact, it makes your designs more real. figma-real is one thing. actually-real is another.
the tools i've had to learn to understand in the process have also helped. helped. like github, for example, is like google drive but for code, and vercel, which is just a cloud computer that takes everything in that google drive and runs it and spits out a link, suddenly made sense. we heavily use Claude code, (thanks to massive amount of credits that came from a dinner we hosted for anthropic's team in Bengaluru. i designed the coasters for the event, on figma xP lol full circle much?) but also tools like Zed, Ghostty, Linear, Bruno, all of it started to feel less like a foreign language and more like a dialect i was slowly picking up. even enjoying doing so.
i have even started noting everything down in Obsidian since then. daily notes. actual daily notes. who have i become?
i was beginning to unconsciously gravitate toward the things i actually loved and was good at. research. service mapping. navigating stakeholder requirements. feature timelines. UI was always the bit i quietly wished someone else would handle. and now, in a way, someone can. enter - Claude. this freed me up to go deeper on the parts that actually need a human. the judgment calls. the why. the what does this actually need to feel like for the person using it.
ngl, that felt lonely at first. and abstract. and genuinely challenging. but that's growth, apparently. all of this is.
figma is not reality. but it's also not the problem. the gap between figma and reality isn't figma's fault. it's the gap between imagination and execution. between what's possible and what's buildable. between designing for the dream and designing for the build. closing that gap, even a little, has been the most interesting thing i've done as a designer this year.
so, even if it did take a seasoned engineer, losing it at me to get me there. so be it. won't have it any other way.
okay byeee. xo