I’m not a designer but…

Image by picjumbo from Pexels
Image by picjumbo from Pexels

I’ve always shied away from design tools like Adobe products, Inkscape, and design in general. In all fairness, my late-2014 Macbook can’t handle too much sophisticated software but even if it could, these things always overwhelm me with infinite brush, stroke, and layer possibilities. I’ve always felt one needs a good eye, some design training, and lots of patience to successfully use these tools. The farthest I’ve gone was using GIMP for light image editing. So, you can imagine how I felt when approaching Figma. I got a Figma account simply to LOOK at mockups already made that I could then code. Someone else designs it, and I’ll build it. No problem.

I recently discovered that designing on Figma can actually be a pleasant experience for someone who isn’t a designer. Who knew! For one thing, it’s not some heavy software downloaded onto my poor little mac but an online platform that automatically saves my work. The UI is intuitive and I guess it helps that Figma is geared towards web design specifically.

I wanted to make a wireframe for a website recently. Nothing super fancy, just a first draft combining already designed components from CodeStitch that I could reference. Having this mockup allowed me to see the overall finished look of the homepage while practicing visual hierarchy and white-space principles. Changing colors, text, and replacing images within components was super easy.

I haven’t taken advantage of Figma’s full capabilities but this is plenty for me now. The dev-mode option is really great too since you can see CSS properties but the free beta period has ended :-( There must be other great wireframing tools out there but this ain’t my realm at all so I’m just sharing what I know. I’ll definitely be using Figma in the future since it’s such an efficient way to put together a design, which can then be shown to or shared with others. I can’t speak on the real-time collaboration and feedback feature Figma is famous for yet but that’s certainly a perk if you’re working in a team.