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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.

Michal Malewicz
UX Collective

where teams design together — spoof

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…”

Collaboration in design of the early 2000's

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.

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