I have been a wholehearted Sketch person for years, and something has just made me look up from it.
Sketch was a liberation when it arrived. Made for screens, by people who understood screens, at a time when we were all still bending a print application into a shape it was never designed for. Paired with InVision to make things clickable, it has been my whole working life for a good while now.
And now there is Figma, and it runs in a browser, which sounds like a small technical detail and is not.
Because here is what happens when the file lives on the internet rather than on my laptop. There is no version. There is no final, and no final-final, and no attachment I email at eleven at night. There is simply the thing, and everybody can be inside it at the same time, watching each other's cursors.
I have not fully switched, and I want to be honest that some of my resistance is sentiment. I know Sketch. My hands know Sketch. There is a real cost to being a beginner again at anything, and a designer with a decade of muscle memory has more to unlearn than a student does.
But I have learned to be a little suspicious of my own comfort. Every tool I have ever loved was replaced by something that felt worse for about six weeks and better forever afterwards. Flash felt permanent too.
So I am going to sit with the discomfort and pay attention. The browser is a strange place to build a design tool, and strange is usually where the next thing comes from.