Figma feels (to me) like one of those product design empathy experiences where you’re made to wear welding gloves to use household appliances.

I appreciate its very good for rapidly constructing utilitarian interfaces with extremely systemic approaches.

I just sometimes find myself staring at it (and/or swearing at it) when I mistakenly think of it as a tool for expression.

Currently I find myself in a role where I work mostly with people who are extremely good and fast at creating in Figma.

I am really not.

However, I have found that I can slowly tinker my way into translating my thoughts into Figma.

I just can’t think in or with Figma.

Currently there’s discussion of ‘vibe coding’ – that is, using LLMs to create code by iterating with prompts, quickly producing workable prototypes, then finessing them toward an end.

I’ve found myself ‘vibe designing’ in the last few months – thinking and outlining with pencil, pen and paper or (mostly physical) whiteboard as has been my habit for about 30 years, but with interludes of working with Claude (mainly) to create vignettes of interface, motion and interaction that I can pin onto the larger picture akin to a material sample on a mood board.

Where in the past 30 years I might have had to cajole a more technically adept colleague into making something through sketches, gesticulating and making sound effects – I open up a Claude window and start what-iffing.

It’s fast, cheap and my more technically-adept colleagues can get on with something important while I go down a (perhaps fruitless) rabbit hole of trying to make a micro-interaction feel like something from a triple-AAA game.

The “vibe” part of the equation often defaults to the mean, which is not a surprise when you think about what you’re asking to help is a staggeringly-massive machine for producing generally-unsurprising satisfactory answers quickly. So, you look at the output as a basis for the next sketch, and the next sketch and quickly, together, you move to something more novel as a result.

Inevitably (or for now, if you believe the AI design thought-leadering that tools like replit, lovable, V0 etc will kill it) I hit the translate-into-Figma brick wall at some point, but in general I have a better boundary object to talk with other designers, product folk and engineers if my Figma skills don’t cut it to describe what I’m trying to describe.

Of course, being of a certain vintage, I can’t help but wonder that sometimes the colleague-cajoling was the design process, and I’m missing out on the human what-iffing until later in the process.

I miss that, much as I miss being in a studio – but apart from rarefied exceptions that seems to be gone.

Vibe designing is turn-based single-player, for now… which brings me back to the day job…