Goodbye inVision! Who’s next?

Another design tool used by millions just announced they’re shutting down.

If you’ve been designing in the 2010–2017 era you most probably used inVision.

We used it at our company for 99% of all projects, including very complex ones for Fortune 500 companies.

And now they’re going out of business.

There may be a lot of reasons for it — for one Figma’s dominance in the market pushed out other tools. Lack of updates and innovation was probably another problem.

They launched a highly anticipated prototyping/animation tool called inVision Studio which I loved, just to leave it without updates for years.

Even when it launched, it was way better at prototyping animation than what Figma’s "smart animate" does right now.

Being great at something but without persistence is not enough.

But they weren’t the only ones.

Macromedia

We had our “Adobe — Figma” moment in the early 2000’s too.

Same thing happened to Macromedia Freehand in the early 2000’s along with Fireworks and Flash. Beloved, ahead-of-their-time design tools destroyed.

Being great at something but without the persistence is not enough.

XD?

Then when the Adobe-Figma deal was announced, Adobe stopped working on their XD app, which is now in some kind of weird limbo state.

Tools come and go and what you should really focus on is skills, not tools. That way you’ll be able to design even on paper, or in any tool that comes along in the future.

Good design, as a problem-solving skill, can also be just communicated with words — either in writing or by just talking. If you have the designer mindset, you can hear about a problem and then talk through a solution.

No need to move vector shapes around. That can come after and in any tool.

Figmisation of the industry

The Figma obsession needs to stop because you never know what’s coming in 1–2 years and the time spent learning Figma-specific workflows may prove to be completely wasted.

A lot of the ways Figma does things are pretty proprietary and closed-off.

Signs of trouble?

I talked about why I think the Adobe deal didn’t go through in a YouTube video not that long ago. In that video, I predicted that January 1st, 2024 would be a defining moment.

This is when Figma said they will start charging companies for access to “Dev mode”.

Given the typical ratio of 1 designer per 10 developers, for many companies that would 10x their monthly spending for something they previously had for free. And the “extra features” didn’t look that inviting either.

I said one of three scenarios would happen, and it did.

Figma extended the “free trial” of dev mode until the end of January 2024. That kind of means not enough businesses were on board to pay for this.

Developers, Developers, Developers

Will the greed of going after the developer market be the nail in the coffin of Figma? Possibly. Or maybe they’ll figure out a way out of it.

More emerging tools like Lunacy and Penpot are catching up and competition is very good for the end users.

It forces companies to both innovate and lower prices. But who knows, maybe we’ll go straight to code and Adobe will bring back XD not as a competition to Figma, but to Framer?

Are you actually ready for a post-figma world?

Let me know.

Community Says

• _sami1.0: I'm always exploring other tools so when ever a company decides to rip off customers, I don't get affected. I'm exploring Framer & Webflow too. I'm a big supporter of "tool shouldn't limit your creativity" but it's also necessary to master some tools in order to make your work flow smooth & fast.. Always have a backup option incase a company shuts down.

• Michal Malewicz: Sometimes it happens very fast. Who knows how that planned 10x price hike for businesses will work out for Figma. A lot of companies are already quitting and from talks from behind the scenes it's not looking rosy. But may be just gossip

• kenny.kenray: I was affected when Adobe bought Macromedia Freehand and later killed it when they had InDesign. The same thing happened with Pagemaker and QuarkXpress. Master the tools but never be totally dependent on them.

• Michal Malewicz: Same! I loved Macromedia and the Adobe evil-lawsuit-based-acquisition was horrible news. There was even a movement called "free freehand!" to buy the ownership back from Adobe and re-release it open source. So yeah - skills first, tools second.

• eclecticsoulbanana: What tools do they abandon figma for?

• Michal Malewicz: Currently businesses are going back to Sketch because it's actually a lot cheaper (and with the upcoming paid dev mode it will be 10-12x cheaper than Figma). Many are going to Penpot because while not completely there with functionality, you can self-host it and pay ZERO dollars even for companies with 1000 designers and have all the cloud data locally, so less security risk. Many are also going to direct-to-code tools like webflow and framer. The future won't be figma dominated either way.

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