Member-only story
This is NOT collaboration
Design tools are ultra powerful now, yet they seem to highlight the nightmarish features of collaboration the most.
Yes, this is going to be one of those controversial articles, and if you’re a Figma superfan, you likely want to start throwing rocks at me right now. Am I right? But please hold off for a while, and hear me out.
Collaboration is…
Starting my design career in the late ’90s, collaboration simply meant someone sitting behind your shoulder at a clunky grey PC, and pointing at the screen.
“Move that here!” and then “No, that’s too far…”
Our CRT monitors got smudges where the fingers pointed, so the more smudged the display was, the more feedback someone had received. You could almost call each fingerprint a modern-day “Figma comment”.
But we’ve gone pretty far since then. The design tools evolved from the Adobe-only days, with first Sketch, and then Figma showing designers completely new ways to work.
Currently, collaboration is a hot topic. It’s been considered the best innovation since sliced bread.
Nearly every Figma user I talked to, says they prefer this tool because of the great collaboration features it has. I’d bet that the free plan and OS independence (Sketch is Mac only) has a little more to do with this, but I understand why not many people want to admit to those reasons.
They even made collaboration the main marketing message at Figma.com
How to show collaboration?
I believe this is an incorrect approach to show collaboration. Why?
