My pursuit of Figma plugins is a bit self-centered. I just want to make tools I will personally use. I realized that for every repetitive thing I have to do in my day to day design work, I could just create a plugin that does it for me. Helps me and helps others. Also, Figma provides a marketplace with a ready audience. I just need to capture their contact info so I can inform them of any new plugin that comes out. Don’t need to start from scratch. And since it’s a weekend hobby thing, I don’t need to stress over them making money, although that would be a nice bonus. Can never stack enough sats!
Discussion
Those are the best projects.
I use Figma and am intrigued 🙂
Favourite plugins?
One I really like lately is called svgMotion. It animates svgs but in somewhat of a limited way. I’m thinking I will make a similar plugging but extend the capabilities if possible.
But why ? Using Cursor v0 and screen shots from https://mobbin.com … you can skip Figma. It’s wild … we’re at the end of that whole pixel design Figma world.
And this is coming from a 15+ years deep career as a #ux consultant.
You’re just copying other designs then …
Sad to say it ... but most of the people out there don't care.
Customer/users want a familiar experience, business owners want something "close" to the competition... and the dev team wants a quicker idea to feature sprint than they quoted.
Ultimately ... everyone "just wants it to work". And we #UXdesigners are trying to innovate & do cool stuff... which ultimately takes longer to do, to explain/justify, harder to defend when the critics come along with the 'ya-buts'.
... consistency with the market ( +1 ) extra cool feature is the sweet spot.
This is the same problem as dribble - shit replicating shit and you end up with more shit. Mobbin is a bit better than dribbble - I’ll give them that, many good apps there. But hey … there are thousands of replicas out there so there’s a market for it. Copy and improve, copy and improve, there’s certainly a case to be made.
I don’t think Figma first designs are going away any time soon, but I suspect many will move straight into prototypes or fully exported apps. The simple stuff will be replicated but more complex b2b will remain a task for Figma.
Agree 100%… when projects are cost constrained, it’s fastest path wins. And B2B platforms 100% agree in designing out those screens in Figma.
Here’s to hoping for more of those projects in 2025
also ... nothing worse than building a very innovative and clever app only to have someone way more senior & closer to the leadership / VP level come along and say ... "just do it this way".
So many times those 11th hour side conversation have ended up mading Figma a bit of a jail cell ... where it's pushing pixels and reverting designs to some app someone saw and really liked, and wants to follow in a "must be in this update" sort of way.