They Killed Figma (Again) and Why Code Won't Kill Your Creativity

Another day, another feature launch that makes people go crazy declaring the death of Figma.

I look closer and it's a WYSIWYG editor for your codebase.

I look the other way and it's people arguing that designing in code creates constraints that will kill your creativity.

Creativity doesn't care about the medium. It cares about exploration.

There's this very cool tool called Unicorn Studio. I won't go into details, but basically it lets you easily create shaders (cool, effect-y things that make users go "wow").

It gives you a straightforward way to put that into your website, helps you optimize for production, hosts your files, and connects directly to Framer (and a bunch of other things).

And honestly? I don't care. I've never used it in production. A few times a week I open the tool, throw a few different effects onto the canvas, tweak parameters, create cool images, maybe post them to Twitter, and leave. I don't give a fuck about the code.

I use the tool because it feeds my creativity.

Designers want to explore ideas. They don't need to care about what's inside, they just want tools that make exploration easy.

And maybe a WYSIWYG doesn't fulfill that need…

Ok, now what about the push against code?

Why people are afraid of code

Most prior art was built for production.

People are afraid to anchor design tools in code because most “code-first” tools were built when code was expensive to make. They were made to help developers implement features at the last stage of product development. And that turns into a self-imposed constraint: we assume “code” means “production constraints.”

Code can be explorative

Did you know? Vectors are code.

What are you saying? my explorative, unconstrained medium is built on top of code? That can't be. That's going to constrain my creativity.

The difference isn't the medium, it's the tools built around it. The medium is just an implementation detail.

A tool can be built that lets you explore ideas using real programming code.

Code is becoming so cheap that it's becoming viable for explorative tools

A quick history lesson (this is probably not even close to accurate, but it helps me explain my point):

When writing materials were expensive (especially parchment), people didn't waste them. Drafts and calculations were often done on reusable surfaces, while the “official” version went onto a durable, expensive final medium.

As paper manufacturing scaled and costs collapsed, the medium stopped feeling precious. People could draft, iterate, print, and discard freely on the same surface.

So what if, now that code isn't as expensive, we can use it for drafts too, for prototypes, exploration, and experimentation, and just throw it away when we're done?

1. Figma is happily alive.

2. A WYSIWYG editor doesn't enable the kind of exploration designers want.

3. Instead of pushing against “designing in code” (whatever that means), let's push toward more creative tools, whatever medium they come in (and yeah, it's probably going to be code).