John RodriguesAI Design Engineer | Designing 0→1 AI native Products

Keeping with @Figma changes be like!

30 Mar 2024 · 1 min

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John Rodrigues describes the friction when Figma adds new features like variables. Designers keep redesigning components to use them, while engineers translate design colors into their own patterns instead of using what designers built, breaking consistency across teams.

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I'm famous for going to config and then the next day coming back to work and redoing everything in my component file to add the new feature. As soon as variables came out, I'm like, oh, we're doing this now. And that has sparked a different way that we as a company think about colors. Or it sort of revealed, at least to me, that I wasn't realizing how the engineers were already doing colors. Colors. What was happening is they were just doing it their way and I was getting cut out of the process. They were taking what they saw from my work, digesting it in their own developer way, and then it was making customization difficult because we had a different way that we were solving the color problem.