Figma Sucks, Use Penpot
2025-04-16
Hey-hey 👋🏿
I remember the first time a classmate in high-school sent me a Adobe XD file in our Graphic Design class to print out on the VERY expensive plastic label filter.
I spent all day downloading XD because my PC didn't have it for some reason, and while I was doing that, I was reading the documentation for what it was, how it worked and why we should use it.
In short, the answer is communication. As all things tend to be.
Once Upon A Time
When you wanted to communicate your vision to a team, you would need to be an artist or an author. An artist can demonstrate their vision with pencil and paper. An author can construct an image within your head with the power of words alone.
In the end, to get exactly what you want from a team of individuals, you MUST be able to communicate or demonstrate what it is that you want. Otherwise you'll say things like my clients say.
"I want it to look like Facebook, except for the contacts, which should work like Twitter kinda."
or
"Can you make it look like Overwatch, but low-poly like what you usually do?"
or even
"Something like Escape from Tarkov, but better."
Okay, yes gotcha. Will do. Thanks bud, I'll get right on it.
I could be a Carpenter you know? I could've been working with my hands. Making shit that mattered. But no-
Communication is King
Every relationship falls apart because communication sucked. Romantic and Professional. If the entire gist was to get your ideas across, then you could run into an issue where you are challenged in every way to tease that idea out of your head.
Of course, with programmers in particular, they don't have an artistic or yearning bone in their fucking bodies, so the challenge became systematic instead. Enter XD, Figma, and now Penpot.
Fuck conveying an idea. These programs are used for one thing and one thing only, making a template. After you have a template and the pixel measurements associated with it, you can copy and paste that shit onto every page. This was before React blew up I think, so components and the idea of just abstracting from a component wasn't up to snuff just yet. I don't know that for sure because my brain was too smooth and I was scared to type hello world.
This systematic method has become so extreme that now developers opt to use Tailwind to construct all their styles instead of hiring a Graphic Designer. And as AI becomes more of a thing, companies will choose to use AI to design their sites next.
AI is useful, but it's not THAT useful. If you've read my previous posts already, you can probably tell why I think this is stupid. But if you haven't, I'll explain really quickly. You know how we've fallen into a corpo site massacre for websites these days? Everything looks the same? Standards have become overly strict?
Well, since AI can only do what it has seen before, what AI is trained to spit out, is more of these sites. More of these styles. More of these buttons. You're not getting claymorphism from AI. Not like you haven't seen done in those mockups I posted a while back.
For new aesthetics, new looks, new ideas, you NEED an artist. It's not even a question. Some programmers I know, me included, are artists that have been strapped to the programmer table to pay the bills. You do what you gotta do. But the difference in what I breathe into front-end work is big enough for me to be asked to do more. I take that as a compliment, but also a warning.
Designers are essential. XD, Figma and Penpot in the hands of a programmer will give you shitty websites, just like books in the box of an AI will give you shitty penmanship. But that's besides the point.
Anyways
These programs are one particular feature of Photoshop cranked to 11 and rebuilt for web development. Snapping.
Oh my god there's so much snapping. Global snapping, relational snapping, predictive snapping, GOSPEL SNAPPING! IT JUST DOESN'T END!
It even has MULTIPLAYER! Yes, just like how Google Drive revolutionized the way we share and collab on documents, now you can collab on designs without DrawTogether!
This very site was originally designed in Penpot you know?
Ahh, look at that. I started working on the card headers and footers then said "fuck it" and started doing whatever I wanted. It's my site after all! I tinker, play, experiment, and throw weird shit at the wall for fun! I'll change it later if I wanna, and I do all the time.
The industry standard for this kind of work is Figma, just like the industry standard for 3D work is Autodesk Maya. One may wonder why I'm on Penpot and not Figma. It's because Penpot is open-source and self-hostable!~
And also because Figma makes you pay 15 bucks a month to use Inspect Element on your site so you can copy and paste the HTML and CSS work. I'm a man that votes with my fucking wallet! If a service is doing something I don't like, I just won't pay! Simple! With Figma, I went to the next step of divesting from their platform all together.
If They Wanted To, They WOULD
As someone who works in a company, I promise you that Companies do NOT care about you. No matter how good the social media presence, no matter how many hearts they put out in the weekly newsletter. You can be fucked up with no warning and even less recourse at their own discretion. You cannot have brand/company loyalty today. It's just a stupid thing to do. If they are publicly traded, they are evil.
In unrelated news, here's Discord getting caught talking with bankers about going public on the stock market like Reddit did. -> Link
Don't trust companies, trust people. Wherever it's reasonable for me to NOT use a company's service, I will. But I work with collectives and independents all the time. Never had a terrible experience. The downside is that companies have capital. That money is a deal with the devil, so you have to trade off what's important for you to function vs what's important to your values. I dance on this balancing act pretty well and I'm not stressed about it because I've already moved so much off of platforms. Even this site is an expression of my will to be scrappy and slam shit together myself.
But that's all for a different blog post.
Figma is going the way of many big SaaS companies. They will do whatever they have to so that you pay that monthly sub, and forget about it. Even though most of their money comes from stabbing the pockets of other big businesses, they'll fuck you, the consumer, no matter what. There's no downsides after all.
If you were looking for the alternative to Figma, it's Penpot. Come on over. It's not perfect, but it's not as fucked as GIMP either. Trust me. :)
Anyways, I'm getting back to reworking some of my Roblox Animations.
Chow(?)~ | Luther✌🏿
