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This is NOT collaboration
Design tools are ultra powerful now, yet they seem to highlight the nightmarish features of collaboration the most.
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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…”
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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.