History is full of software winners

Across waves of software cycles in every vertical we’ve seen dominant platforms that capture the vast majority of the value of a market over time. Workday, Salesforce, Hubspot, Adobe, Zoom, Google. The power law dictates that there will be one or a handful of winners as data, trust and recognition accrues.

This has also so far been true of the design world. From professional print and graphic design in Adobe suite to interface design first in Sketch and then Figma.

Most companies designing interfaces at scale use Figma now, with a reported 90% market share (2023).

Yet their stock is currently 81% down since IPO, and the market for new design tools is experiencing somewhat of a cambrian explosion. The whale is wounded and there’s sharks in the water.

But why?

Figma has its own issues. Since the failed sale to Adobe the product strategy has felt rudderless, panicky. For the first time it’s not that clear where Figma is headed.

But I think there’s something bigger going on. Or several things.

1. AI coding tools like Cursor and Claude Code are allowing engineers, and by extension curious or technical designers, to design with code.
2. Those same tools are getting much better at design. Far from perfect, as any designer who’s actually built on vibe coded apps will tell you. But much, much better. And the live prototypes add fidelity in a way static mocks can’t
3. As engineers speed up the bottleneck in any given product team is being felt further up the stack in the design team. In modern teams it’s no longer acceptable for a designer to spend 2 weeks in their mind palace creating the perfect UI.

In this new race Figma actually has a disadvantage. They’re suddenly the slow incumbent with the wrong tech stack and a large enterprise customer-base adding drag.

So what next?

Here’s where it gets exciting.

I don’t believe there will be a platform that replaces Figma. Or at least, I don’t believe it will be a platform owned by one business.

As product, design and engineering collapse together, design interfaces will start to look more like dependencies in the code itself.

After all, the only correct source of truth is code. Open, shared, with common standards.

And with Git worktrees and virtual machines in the cloud we already have everything we need for true collaborative explorative design. The only remaining piece of the puzzle are the plugins themselves.

The great unbundling

We’re already starting to see this happen. Tools like Agentation - redlining with AI superpowers - and Pencil - a full design tool installable as a vscode plugin - suggest a future where design teams interact directly with production code, abstracted away through familiar paradigms.

Vibe coding tools in their many forms also suggest a future where we trust AI with design execution and interact only through intent. Any codebase with a strong design system should no longer need pixel tweaking for most tasks, and designing with your voice feels like flying.

All of this might mean a designer’s working day involves some evolution of a development environment, working in lockstep with engineers on exploration, and zero time ‘updating the components in Figma’. Bliss.

There’s work to do. Installing dependencies, understanding git, interacting with real data and understanding the constraints of data models with millions of database rows is non trivial, and that complexity must be paid down.

But it all feels solvable in time. And in the meantime there’s nothing to stop the design tooling ecosystem starting to feel like what our comrades in software engineering have enjoyed for years: choice. Hundreds or thousands of choices across frameworks, languages and code packages maintained by both for profit and open source maintainers. Not built in a paid product marketplace, but open on the web.

Hell, we’ll be building our own design tools, as individuals and companies. (Case in point: this week I built a webGL shader tool in 15 minutes to create a single effect for a website.)

And with choice comes more heterogeneous outcomes and maybe, just maybe, the most liberating time to be a designer in decades.

I can’t wait to see what we create.

I’m tracking design tooling at designtools.fyi - let me know if I’m missing one or you’d like to contribute

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Read previous thoughts on product design:

• The bifurcation of product design
• Designing closer to the edge