It was a sad day when Invision announced that they were to close at the end of 2024. Once valued at $2b, and the darling of the creative sector, it just goes to show how quickly the mighty can fall if you fail to innovate.
In 8 years, Figma disrupted the entire design industry. They moved artwork into the cloud and leveraged the web browser to combine the prototyping prowess of Invision with the design masterclass of Sketch, for whom it is now difficult to see how they will fit into the new landscape.
For a UI designer, there is simply no option but to choose Figma, a design tool that does it all. For those of us who remember the days of designing websites in layered Adobe Photoshop files, Figma is an absolute joy to work in. The huge array of extensions, toolkits, 3rd party integrations and smart developer tools, allow us to design at a speed that was never possible before. And that can only be a good thing for our clients.
We can focus our energy on creativity, strategy and execution rather than artwork production. With ‘mobile first design’ now the default, we need to design smarter and not harder.
So it’s goodbye to Photoshop, Invision and Sketch. Figma have won the battle and thankfully remain independent following Adobe’s attempted takeover. It will be interesting to see where we are in another 10 years.
P.S I wish Figma would simplify their billing model, but that is an article for another day.
