No Figma, I won't fit in your little box

Summary

Andreas MøllerSeptember 30, 2025 Once upon a time, design and code worked as one. Web designers would imagine beautiful designs and turn them into beautiful websites with HTML and CSS. As the web grew both in use and capability, companies started offering software services built entirely on the web. These companies needed more and more software to be built and more and more people to build it. They started sorting people under the names “Designer” and “Developer”, so they were easy to organize. Designers would go into a design team and draw user interfaces. Developers would go into a dev team and write code. And thus, the hand-off was born. In the years to come, the divide grew stronger. Designers stopped writing CSS and withdrew to vector drawing tools like Figma. Developers started adopting web frameworks with increasingly complex build systems, making it ever more difficult for designers to contribute. And so, the hand-off grew stronger and darkness spread across the land.Today, it is common for companies to have cross-functional product teams that combine both designers and developers, but they still work in separate tools and rely hesitantly on the dreaded hand-off. Treating the symptom Through the years there have been several attempts and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on trying to fix the hand-off. Despite this, we are no closer to solving the problem than we were 10 years ago. But, the hand-off is a symptom, not the disease. The real problem in this industry is the split we have created between “Designer” and “Developer”.Where developers have HTML and CSS, designers have layers and style. Developers say “background”, designers say “fill”. Developers use flexbox, designers use auto-layout. The differences are tiny but just big enough to ensure there is friction. The hand-off is just a symptom of the larger issue: designers and developers speak entirely different languages. A smaller and smaller box When designers were kicked out of the codebase and fo...