Jason Knight
2 min readJul 14, 2022

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Figma is not a design tool. At least not for the web. It's a paint program for artists who know nothing about actual design, given that those who use it -- just like the turds who used to use photoshop for "design" -- are utterly and completely unaware or illiterate of standards, specifications, guidelines, accessibility, usability, and nearly every other engineering concept that separations design from being "just art." Especially this "screen media f*** everything else" attitude so common amongst such artists.

ACTUAL web design is starting with your content or a facsimile of future content as if HTML, CSS for screen media don't even exist. You arrange it in a flat text editor in an order that makes sense, then you mark it up semantically; saying what things are structurally and grammatically, NOT what you want them to look like.

Then and only then do you create your screen layout -- the first of what could be many. Content dictates markup, content + markup + device and user limitations dictates layout. THEN you do your paintover in a manner that's compatible with flow and responsiveness. In actual design the art should be last, not first.

This whole notion of "front end" and "design" being two separate things is one of the most f***wited idiotic bits of bullshit I've seen in 45+ years of programming, half that with web technologies. It is why so many layouts are broken for myself and many others as a user, it's why so many startups fail within their first year, and it's why accessibility lawsuits are doubling yearly.

And it needs to stop. The last damned thing we needed was just another pixel pushign bit of bullshti letting the fools and scam artists who think they know what design is have another tool to spank their crank over.

It's like handing a five year old a pack of crayons and calling them an architect.

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Jason Knight
Jason Knight

Written by Jason Knight

Accessibility and Efficiency Consultant, Web Developer, Musician, and just general pain in the arse

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