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Mourning Figma: the end of a chapter
Reactions and reflections on Adobe acquiring Figma
The news hit this morning like a punch to the chest, Adobe is acquiring Figma. Design communities everywhere are filled with “NOOOOO” gifs, confusion, and hot takes galore.
As a Figma fan for years, it’s a sad day for me, but not an unexpected one.
Figma has been a design community darling for the last three to four years, rocketing up to (an estimated) ~77% market penetration for Product Design tools. They’ve developed an amazing dialog with their community, through free conferences, and a team of design advocates who do incredible work training people and keeping their hand on the pulse of what customers care about. But they suffer from what many successful startups suffer from, which is having a product larger and more complex than a small, lean team can actively iterate on quickly.
I wrote about five areas I thought were important for them to focus on recently. This acquisition presents a huge acceleration opportunity for them (and a huge payday for the founders, no doubt).
Adobe has invested a huge amount into Adobe XD, to relatively modest success. They’re frequently in the top 3 tools, but decisively behind Sketch and Figma. They are an absolute titan of the design industry, and have been for decades. They acquire promising tools left and right, and will seemingly do whatever it takes to stay relevant (other than listen to their users about pricing, or removing deceptive patterns from their practices).
There are amazing people at Adobe doing incredible work. They’ve never really succeeded in enabling real-time collaboration in their core products in the way Figma has though.
What happens now?
Stages of grief
Designers will go through the five stages of grief over the coming weeks or months. And then, very little will change for the next 2–3 years. This is a pattern we see pretty consistently in acquisitions, especially Adobe ones such as Macromedia (showing my age there) or more recently, Substance Designer & Painter.
