Well, well, well, well…. in this issue, we’ll look at…
- Adobe,
- Figma,
- Adobe,
- Figma,
- and much more… ( and that is correct is all about Adobe and Figma’s wedding 🤵🏻♀️👰🏿.
Adobe 💍 Figma
If you know me, you already know how many times I told you Adobe could acquire Figma. To recall some points:
📆 Business Consolidation
For many years Adobe has been the place to go for professional designers. In the past 15 years, Adobe, as an institution, has been very strategic in acquiring competitors or any other design company that makes Creative Cloud better.
⚡️ Flash (and my Freehand ✍️)
So Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005.
Before the significant improvements in HTML & CSS in web history, Macromedia took the web with their ⚡️ Flash plugin and other design tools like Freehand. I used to love Freehand as a vector tool; super slick and straightforward to use compared to Illustrator. And I still feel the pain of losingFreehand nowadays.
Bringing the $3.4 billion Adobe paid for Macromedia to the present day will be around 5 billion dollars. But considering how much the web has evolved in the last 17 years, this deal might be similar to what happened with Figma the previous week.
🪐 The CC ecosystem
Winners don’t always win; they never give up. If you reflect a little bit Adobe not only failed to build Xd but also failed to acquire Sketch or even InVision in the past.
And I always believed that Adobe could win the game, outperforming Figma or just buying it. Figma was trying to be everything for Design, but Design is big and has a lot of different facets. If Adobe now does a good job, you could use Figma as your UX UI tools and connect video editing to Premiere, photo editing to Photoshop, Design more distinct icons in Illustrator, create better animations in After Effects, and bring all this experience into a single place and potentially even exporting it as code.
Wait, Juno. But I ❤️ Figma
And before you idolatry Figma. They had a considerable advantage during the pandemic for being more collaborative. And Design is collaborative, by the way.
But also, Figma copied many concepts from other tools like the panels: Design, Prototype, and Inspect from Xd. Frame inside the frame from InVision Studio. And many others. So sometimes they are not creative. They are just good at copying the best ideas.
I told you before: tools are just tools; don’t fall in love for them.
🪦 RIP Sketch
After this big wedding party, I can say that it was really good to work with you, Sketch but your rehearsal to come back is too late for this game.
I love everything Sketch did for me but now is time to let go.
🧒🏼 In addition, good luck Miro and all whiteboard tools, it’s amazing what you did in the past years, but from now kids are not allowed in this room anymore.
🚜 Carrying all the weight
And before you start blaming Adobe for the bad features from Figma, I was working on a project in the past days to review some font weights for a Design System. I got some suggestions from Figma lovers using the new font variable from Figma. In dreams 😴 they are fantastic, but in the real world, it doesn’t really work if you think about different browser versions and how they render fonts.
Below is an HTML I build to demonstrate how the font-weight set in 416 doesn’t really matter for browsers.
So if you want to be a better designer learning a little bit of coding can reduce your tech ignorance once you have to work with devs.
👉 Please copy the Sketch overrides because a lot of people don’t understand why you should make a component if you can override everything in an instance (child).
👉 And a real version control (not a version history)
😅 Oops!… I Did It Again
Also, I told you that Figma was playing really well the startup playbook from Silicon Valley. They were about to charge you to use Figma, but now Adobe is giving you the “bad news.”
It’s part of the strategy to give you a sample and build a huge wall around so you cannot move in tech and maybe for drug dealers too. You were just trapped. 🐀
Another important part of this playbook is about the exit. Yes, investors want the money back and not keep this rolling for so long.
I heard this in the past: any company, at some point, will die. Founders need to make sure the company won’t die and to make it last. Founders have to sell to another company or make an IPO. Otherwise, they will die, especially in tech.
So the pressure is from investors to get the money back, but also, as a founder or person, how much do you really need to have a good life?
Figma founder’s families are good for the next few generations, and that’s it. For real, the Figma mission is beautiful, but in the bottom line, they don’t really care about how much you love Figma 💔.
And please, let’s not make some white dudes billionaires again, let’s support and invest in more diverse founders.
📉 Stocks are going down
And even if you think Adobe is doing great, after the announcement, they had a pretty bad performance in the stock market. Big investors aren’t fans of hug acquisition using cash. Because, let’s face it, $20 billion dollars, do you really believe Figma can pay it back in 10 years?
Let me know your thoughts on this.
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Juno
