I want the best of all my tools. Here is my perfect mashup:
- Powerpoint
- Table Editing
- Text formatting
- Ease of use
- Storyboarding
- Figma
- Symbols
- Constraints
- Concurrent editing
- Cool-factor
- Adobe XD
- Performance/speed
- Large community
- Stable financial resources
Yesterday, I was trying to wire up the prototype of the system I am working on and Adobe XD was sucking so bad that I literally screamed. Their symbols are garbage. Who the fuck thought that changing a symbol on one artboard should change it everywhere? You can’t see the changes you are making and don’t realize you fucked up your whole system! I gave up and switched back over to Figma and started re-creating from scratch.
Today, in Figma, I was trying to make a basic table. It literally took me hours of figuring out the perfect way to set up the symbols so I can make other kinds of tables semi-quickly. In PowerPoint it would have taken under a minute. In Figma, even with the symbols, each table will take a long time. In Adobe XD, they have this thing to “Repeat Grid”. It’s novel, but it totally is inferior to a simple table object. PowerPoint has had this for 20+ years. Why is this so hard?
So for today, I am back to Figma.
The whole things makes me sad. Why are design tools so messed up? Why doesn’t Microsoft make a designer friendly version of PowerPoint? Why can’t PowerPoint use Google Fonts to embed fonts? MS Office makes BILLIONS of dollars. Why can’t they improve it??
I seriously wonder how big the engineering teams are for Microsoft PowerPoint, Figma and Adobe XD. Are they all the same sizes? I hear that Figma has some good stuff in the works for the end of the year. I am hopeful.