It’s been a wild couple of days in the product design space after the announcement, with the majority of the community voicing (mostly) negative and hyperbolic reactions in the form of open letters, blog posts and memes. It’s pretty easy to join in and pile on Adobe, but that won’t really help us understand what this means so I wanted to take a step back and look at the acquisition through a pragmatic lens.

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But before we get into it here are some of the memes I enjoyed:

Aren’t we being a little overdramatic?

Yes I get it, the number of products I actually love using can be counted on one hand and Figma is a big one so naturally, we’re going to be emotionally invested, but we shouldn’t be emotionally driven. I saw blog posts titled along the lines of “Mourning Figma” which just made me think that surely we’re overreacting a bit  here, we have very limited insight into what this actually means so why are we already talking about jumping ship?

What we do know right now is that Figma is great. We also know that this was the biggest private company acquisition ever at $20B. So Adobe definitely understands Figmas’ value proposition and that a big part of that is the design communities' love and wide adoption of the tool.

Another part of this that felt off to me, is everyone treating Adobe like a villain. I think for most of us our passion for design began with booting up an Adobe tool, and we can’t deny they've massively contributed to the design industry being where it is today. I’m not saying they're perfect, far from it, with some of the more glaring issues being their pricing model and tool development, but if acquiring Figma means acquiring their team too, that can only be a positive, potentially even for Adobe’s existing tools.

And finally, based on the official comment not much will change for a good while anyways, so I think mass panic is unwarranted at this point.

That being said, let’s allow ourselves to speculate on what this could potentially mean further down the line:

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👍 Potential Positives

1. Wider adoption — Despite Figma being the standard product design tool, there are still some holdouts using Adobe XD for one reason or another. Figma being introduced into the suite will be a convincing proposition for Adobe XD users to try it out, in addition to exposing the tool to a large number of designers in other fields using the suite.
2. Pricing — Figmas’ pricing model is not ideal by any standards and being part of the suite could give us a more refined model for organizations. This could also mean one price to pay per month as chances are most designers and teams are already paying a separate subscription for the creative suite anyways.
3. Faster development — Figma always seems to hit the nail on the head with its updates, giving us the fleshed-out features we’re asking for, but the pace of updates has definitely slowed down over the years so with more investment and a larger team this could change for the better.
4. Cross integration — Can you imagine Figma with some of the animation features of After Effects for prototyping? or better yet, Illustrator with the seamless collaboration features of Figma? The possibilities make me very excited. Also, I used Adobe XD for a few projects some years ago and what some people are missing is that, despite being unable to keep up, Adobe XD was innovating at times like with their repeating grid feature, so merging the two teams could take Figma to even greater heights.

👎 Potential Negatives

1. Shift in focus —Figma has been known for working to bridge the gap between design and development, something Adobe has not favoured historically over its creative-only focus. If Adobe exercise that influence over Figma, it could lose one of its biggest benefits.
2. Pricing — Adobes’ price points leave a lot to be desired, often making the tools inaccessible to independent creatives. Whilst I highly doubt the Figma free plan will ever change, the higher plans most definitely will and if being part of the suite pushes the price higher than it already is, it could negatively impact its accessibility for smaller teams and independents.
3. Less competition —What made Figma what it is today is competition between itself, Sketch, Adobe XD and even lesser used tools like Invision studio. We don’t have to be experts in business to know that fewer offerings on the market means less pressure to build meaningful features, especially if you have a monopoly over the space.

Only time will tell

As mentioned above, we won’t notice any impact of this for quite some time, so we’ll have to wait to start getting a feel for what will change before we can make informed decisions. Besides, before Figmas’ meteoric rise a good few years ago, Sketch was the standard for product design, and when everyone realised it wasn't keeping up with Figma, migration across the tools wasn’t fun, but we made it happen and we’ll do the same again if necessary, however, there are too many unknowns to even start considering that yet.

What we should keep in mind, is that our value as designers is solving problems regardless of what tool we use to solve them, so we need to practice flexibility when it comes to our tools and avoid being too reliant or attached to them.

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TLDR

We don’t know enough yet to panic so why can’t we err on the side of optimism? besides, no matter how emotionally invested we are, at the end of the day, it’s just a tool and as creative designers, we’ll find ways to do everything we do right now in Figma, elsewhere if it comes to it. There are both potential positives and negatives with the acquisition in the long-term but for now, let's keep enjoying using Figma until we have something worth worrying about.

Thank you for reading!