Why I skip Figma and design straight in Webflow

The age old debate - to Figma, or not to Figma?

Personally, I am both a designer and a developer - so, this debate holds a place near and dear to me.

Everyone seems to have picked their side, and typically, people still design their website in a design tool like Figma or Sketch before moving it into a development tool like Webflow or WordPress.

Me? Oh no, I usually do the opposite. I start a fresh project and start building. Almost every web project I work on never touches Figma, and I absolutely love it.

Is it getting hot in here, or is that just the angry designers who’ve already started typing comments to tell me how wrong I am?

Anyways, jokes aside - here’s the deal.

Figma takes more time

One thing is obvious - there’s a time saving benefit to be had by cutting out the entire design phase. But besides the time saved actually designing in Figma, there’s one MASSIVE time saving benefit that I rarely hear people mention.

Easier designs. When you are limited to the confines of your development tool, you just won’t do things that are extremely complex for development - for example, sliders.

Why is it that pretty much every single Figma design HAS to have a slider in it? Well, they look cool and it doesn’t take the designer much extra time at all - but, all the developers here know how much extra time they add onto the build

Figma leads to more opinionated designs

Figma gives you freedom - freedom to do things which may not be very flexible from a development point of view.

For example - let’s say your about page hero has a button. In Figma, it takes just one click to move a button up - but in Webflow, you have to add a class and style it, which not only takes more time, but could get out of hand quickly.

When your brain is designing with development in mind - you typically leave things as-is in order to ensure easier development.

So, not only is jumping into development going to give you more time NOW, it’s also going to give you more time in the future.

The downside: creativity

That freedom Figma gives you is a double-edged sword. While on one hand, it empowers you to make designs that give developers a nervous breakdown, on the other hand, it empowers you to get creative and try things that you wouldn’t have even considered for a second if you jumped straight into design. Typically, projects that ‘skipped’ the design phase will end up looking more generic and lacking creativity.

Here’s the thing

I’m a bit of a unique situation. Back in the day, I used to be an agency owner - we made marketing sites for companies who were paying us a pretty penny, and they wanted the best. A quickly hacked together design wouldn’t do for clients like this, so we designed everything in Figma first.

If you have a similar situation/project, I would recommend you to do the same. Your clients are paying for the best, so, give them the best.

I, on the other hand, work for Memberstack. My job here at Memberstack is to create examples and demos of how our product can be used - while we don’t want ugly demos, it also doesn’t matter to us whether or not our demos are beautiful, creative designs - in fact, we would actually prefer generic so our customers can see how it might look on THEIR site.

While my job isn’t common, similar projects definitely are - maybe you have a lower-budget client who doesn’t need the best, they just need something that looks good. Maybe you’re prototyping the MVP you’ve been thinking of. Whatever it is, there are TONS of projects out there where the time and complexity savings are completely worth the decrease in creativity.

At the end of the day, something is better than nothing. If the design process is causing you friction in actually launching your project, skip it. However, if you’re working on crafting the perfect design for an established business, the creativity in the design process is something that should NEVER be skipped.