We gave up Sketch and rebuilt our design system in Figma

The tooling limitations made us switch.

Stop holding on and embrace the new

It’s 2021 and you might be tired of hearing about Figma. This article isn’t intended as yet another pitch for Figma, but rather a rhapsody on all the pain points that lead our design team at Brave to replace our tooling with Figma.

And yes, we had to build our entire component library twice. It was painful, but inevitable to achieve a functioning design system at a resource-constrained startup.

Unbearable pain points using Sketch+Abstract

Let me be blunt: everyone still using Sketch+Abstract to manage a design system will experience headaches at every step of sharing the basic building blocks of a design system. It’s simply not a tool made to support design systems. Coupled with other efficiency and collaboration issues, it became apparent to, well, the creators of Figma, that the entire design workflow was ripe for disruption.

Color palette

The foundation of a design system rests on brand and interaction colors. Unfortunately, sharing colors is not supported in Sketch+Abstract. There is a color picker that comes with a “global” set of…