Are Design Tools Relevant Anymore?

I was a product designer for a few years. I had switched careers to design after suffering burn out as a software engineer. During those years, my entire day was spent in Figma, building high fidelity mockups, leading workshops and creating prototypes. While Figma helped me move quickly, rapidly iterating after receiving user feedback, the engineer part of me always felt it was a throwaway step. You build something, only to then have somebody else build it again in code.

I recently had to put on my design hat again, putting together interactive prototypes around a few redesign ideas. At first, I reached for Figma, but after fiddling around for an hour, decided to go a different route. While prototyping in Figma used to be faster than building in code, that’s no longer true. With Claude Code, building out frontend components is fast. Much faster than messing with layers, frames and symbols in Figma.

Let me explain.

Enterprise apps have well defined brand guidelines. Colors, type, scale. They are often built off an existing component library (think Bootstrap, shadcn). This means you can use Claude in a way that follows the look and feel of your application, and is constrained to the components the development team leverages. The rails help keep Claude from going off into the deep end.

Design then becomes focused on solving the user’s problem through UX, less fiddling around with UI. I can open Freeform on my iPad, sketch something out, and prompt Claude to leverage our foundation to make my sketch a reality. Then, I can dig into the code and tweak things to be just right.

The result is a more interactive, true to life prototype that gives your engineering team a head start with coded components. You get better feedback from users and stakeholders as it’s easier to visualize what the final product looks like. You discover pitfalls that might not have shown up until an engineer was halfway into the card. On top of all that, you move a lot faster, you’re designing and building in 1 step rather than 2, giving your engineering team a head start once designs are finalized.

So then, what’s the point of Figma and Sketch?

You can tell Figma is battling with this reality by pushing Figma make. The issue is, it’s too constrained and produces poor results. You can’t link it to existing coded components, Tailwind configs, etc.

On the other hand, usin my approach requires a technical background. You need to guide with framework suggestions, foundational setup and be able to takeover and tweak yourself.

That said, there in the shorter term there’s likely still a place for Figma and Sketch at the table. Designing using the method I talked about requires a technical background, otherwise your results will be all over the place, and small tweaks will be next to impossible.

As the technology gets better though, I’ll be surprised if Figma and Sketch survive the next couple of years.