Figma to Sketch — a sceptic’s story
Considering the move from Sketch to Figma? I’d like to share some of our team’s wins, fails, and things we discovered along the way. Hopefully, it helps you on your quest to work out what’s best for you.
Just about a year ago, our team lead at Orderin very tentatively put forward the idea of us moving over from Sketch to Figma. My reaction was, well, melodramatic to say the least.
Fast forward about eleven months of scaling the face of the learning curve, squinting furiously at my screen, shouting at auto-layout, and wreaking havoc upon my teammates’ meticulously crafted designs … and we’re finally in a good place.
While, all things considered, I would rate our move as a big level up to our team, it certainly was not the smooth, frictionless transition that Figma makes it out to be.
While an appealing promise, this effortless crossover is just not realistic for a working design team. We had to up and move all our files, learn a new tool, re-design our workflow, and recreate our design system entirely. We did not have a dedicated design ops team and had to yolo-transition in the midst of all our regular activities and deadlines.
No, it wasn’t simple, easy, or quick. Yes, I had moments where I felt like we fudged the process entirely.
Why the scepticism?
My resistance to the idea originally was not completely irrational. I had several concerns about moving to Figma, namely:
- Was this just another passing trend? Ditching known, reliable tools for this new hotness made me quite uncomfortable (most change-averse UX designer ever), and the fact that EVERYONE seemed to be doing it made me resist the idea even more
- Would the complete reliance on an internet connection screw us over? We have a lot of power cuts and internet issues here in South Africa, often leaving us with low, or nonexistent connections. Plus, the thought of working in a browser did not appeal to me.
- Sketch is awesome. I loved using it. Coming from using Adobe Illustrator for UI work before, this s**t was revolutionary. Sketch has been around for ages and a lot of time and care has gone into creating a design tool that I could not do without.
We desperately needed a change
My own bias aside, I couldn’t ignore that at the time, we were experiencing massive frustrations in our workflow and tools. We were combining a number of platforms to get our work done, and each one came with its own unique set of dramas.
Sketch, for designing
While no fault of Sketch, the first version of our design system in Sketch was clunky and difficult to work with. Granted, we didn’t do the world’s best job at setting it up, but it wasn’t serving us well; symbols were just hard to work with and designers often detached them and made their own variations. It was a mess. One particular file also constantly crashed, and I could never quite work this out. I tried getting rid of broken and duplicate symbols, deprecated library files, size … nothing helped. Anyone else experienced this?
Abstract, for versioning and sharing
I’ve never been a fan of Abstract. While I love the idea behind the tool and the problem they’re trying to solve, I personally don’t think the “its like Git, but for designers” approach really works unless it’s hyper-policed (Commit messages like “Changes” and “Some stuff”, lol). Mainly though, Abstract was EXTREMELY slow to sync and download and also tended to slow Sketch down to a ‘just put me out of my misery’ level crawl.
Marvel, for handover, reviews, prototyping, and user testing
Marvel was just a never-ending supply of glitches and buggy UI for us. The team consensus was that the way it worked was weird and inefficient, and that task flows were convoluted and frustrating. Their user testing feature, which was a big selling point at the time, also turned out to be rather disappointing.
All in all, we were experiencing a lot of inefficiencies, getting dragged down by our tools and being generally irritated at life.
So, we were hoping for 3 important things from Figma -
1- Roll three tools into one, making things a lot simpler, more centralised (and have change left over in our design budget)
2- Make remote collaboration and sharing easier and faster
3- Allow us to learn from our previous (failed) design system and set up a brand new, more inclusive, functional one
The promises, and the reality
As mentioned before, Figma goes to great lengths to assure potential users of just how easy and frictionless it is to move over. And yes, a lot of it does feel very copied, ahem, intuitive. The keyboard shortcuts are mostly the same, you have pages, artboards, layers, shapes, guides and grids. You can even import your Sketch files, and things will display just fine 99% of the time. If you’re working as an individual, or a small team, then you should be golden. The anti Sketch propaganda, AHEM, blog posts were right.
However … as soon as library files come into play everything changes.
Recreating libraries
This is what will happen if you import a Sketch library file (warning, intense Figma geekery ahead):
- Your colour and text styles will be lost and you’ll need to set them up again (depending on how you’ve created them up in Sketch)
- Some of your symbols, especially if they’re nested, will look weird, and will need to have text and colour styles re-applied
- After fixing up these basic things, you would then enable this file as a library in Figma
Then, if you import your design files that previously used this library in Sketch:
- Your imported file and symbols will not ‘automagically’ link to the newly set up library file in Figma (you might scoff, but I had genuinely hoped it would work this way)
- Symbols in the document will be kept intact as symbols, and
- Figma will create copies of all the external library symbols used in the document, and place them in a hidden group called ‘External Symbols’
- Your document symbols will be linked to these ‘External symbols’ in the group pictured above
- You’ll delete that ‘External symbols’ group because you want to link to your new library in Figma
- Because you deleted the ‘External Symbols’ layer, symbols instances won’t know what to link to, and you’ll see a ‘Restore component’ button when you select any symbol instance
Now comes the biggest, most tedious piece of work:
- You will need to manually relink all the symbols in your document to components in the new Figma library
- There’s no easy way to do this, it’s a manual and painstaking process (I tried a few ‘Find and replace’ plugins, but no joy)
- If your component had overrides applied before (for e.g. button text in the design that’s different to the original component), the overrides will reset when relink to the library component in Figma
You’ll need to do this for every single file that you import that needs to link to a library. It will take time, and you’ll need to reference your UI set (in Sketch, or Marvel) to make sure that your new files in Figma look the same as before.
Something else to be aware of — if you’ve zealously and enthusiastically gone and relinked a bunch of components in your file to library components, and then place the main library component in a variant group (a fantastic Figma feature), all your instances of the component in the file will detach from the main component and become regular layer groups. Sob. Once a component has been converted into a group, you can not swop out a group with a symbol — something you could do in Sketch.
The big lesson? Set your library up first as thoroughly as possible before starting to link to it in other documents.
Collaboration
On the bright side, Figma does make for amazing collaboration. It’s so cool to be working on something, and seeing your team members’ cursors flying past you. You really do feel like you’re working together. This feature is so successful, I see Sketch releasing their own version of it.
But of course, this does mean that everyone (I mean, EVERYONE) will be able to see your work; it’s no longer just the artboards that are neatly pushed to Marvel, Invision or Zeplin that can be accessed and scrutinised. Depending on your file permissions, anyone in your organisation can pop in at any time and catch you, so to speak, with your pants down. Because of this, I’ve had to change up my processes slightly, and keep all in-progress work in separate, private files. For PMs, devs and QAs used to seeing a neat arrangement of artboards in Marvel, being dropped in the sea of a huge open canvas was quite unsettling, so it has become more important to group and label artboards clearly and visibly.
All in all, however, though it’s definitely weird to be so exposed at first, it does feel like this has forced me to become a lot more focussed on documenting, organising, noting, and versioning work.
A few other things worth mentioning
- Yes, you work entirely online, even with the desktop app. Though files store locally, allowing you continued access when you disconnect, and syncing when connection is restored, you do need an internet connection to use the app in full. Without a connection, you won’t be able to access any files you didn’t already have open when disconnecting.
- Nope, it’s not slow at all
- We haven’t really caught on to using the version history feature, I know it’s something we should use, but have not created any processes around that as yet
- The community section is a great addition with lots of free resources
- Basic prototyping and out-of-the-box animation is much better than in previous tools I used (Sketch, Invision, Marvel)
- Components in Figma, while quite mindset shift from Sketch, are incredibly powerful and flexible (I’m obsessed with Auto Layout)
- It’s not perfect, for sure, and there’s lots of room for improvement, but there’s a great community drive behind it which I love
All in all?
I’m really happy that we moved. The Sketch icon still lurks in the bottom bar of my Mac, but I honestly don’t miss much about it. It brought me tangible joy to uninstall Abstract the first chance I got. It’s really inspiring and motivating to see the other designers in our team starting to leverage Figma’s advantages. I can also see changes in our processes outside of the design team — by opening up design in this way, it’s becoming less exclusive, more easily accessible.
Our new design system, Elements, is a gorgeous poster child of cross-functional collaboration that continues to develop. More on that soon!
If you’ve made it this far — are you considering switching? Has your team switched and loved it, or, hated it? I’m interested to know how it went! I hope there’s some useful info here, please get in touch if you have any questions.
