Photoshop is no doubt an incredibly powerful program. It’s been the industry standard for photo editing for years, and it’s capable of editing much more than still images.The only limit in Photoshop is your imagination, so there’s nothing stopping you from using it to design a website. It’s long been a staple for web designers and it’s probably not going anywhere any time soon. But just because you can design a good-looking website in Photoshop doesn't mean it’s the best tool for the job.In this post, we’ll talk about a new set of tools for web design that our design and development team is excited about and see some of the ways they surpass Photoshop in form and function.

The Rise Of Cloud-Based Web Design Programs

Cloud-based web design programs have been on the rise over the last few years, quickly gaining popularity along with a host of other cloud-based apps. Global research firm Gartner predicts the global public cloud services market is projected to grow 17.5% by the end of 2019 to total $214.3 billion, while an estimated 83% of enterprise workloads will be run on cloud systems by 2020.On the design software front, companies like Figma, Sketch, and InVision have been giving Adobe a run for its money. Not only are these programs very UX-focused with a clean UI for a smooth and easy design experience, but they also make life a little easier for developers, as well.

Cloud-Based Design Apps Bring Convenience For Designers And Developers

Each of the aforementioned cloud-based programs comes with some pretty handy features that make for a more seamless transition between design and development.For each element in your design, the program automatically generates CSS attributes that developers can paste right into their code. This is a huge time saver compared to having to physically measure out every individual element’s spacing (Photoshop does, at the very least, provide width and height CSS attributes).But it doesn’t stop at sizing assistance. These programs also provide attributes for drop shadows, constraints, typography, and color.These newer programs all offer prototyping, which allows designers to mock up how a website will function once the design is implemented by developers. Figma and InVision both include sticky elements, transition effects, and hover states for a hyper-realistic browsing mockup (I’ve even used InVision prototypes for screen recordings). Designers can also frame mobile prototypes in a phone frame so that when it’s sent off to clients, they have an accurate idea of what the mobile design will actually look like.Components are a huge advantage that these newer programs have on Photoshop. In Figma, you can create a component for elements of the website that appear on every page, like the navigation bar or the footer. When you make a change to the master component, all of the instances also update with those changes. Convenient!Cloud-based design programs also win at making the design workflow easier. 60fps interactive editing allows you to see the actual changes you’re making in real-time, which makes an enormous difference. You no longer have to drag a marquee outline of your shape and hope it looks good once it’s placed.

Figma Vs. Adobe

So is Adobe doing anything to compete with this new crop of cloud-based editing tools? Well, sort of.Adobe's response to these new UX design apps is Adobe XD, which offers a lot of the functionalities I highlighted above. The downside is when it comes to development, your developer will also need a subscription for XD to get all the assets. If you have a team of developers who will all need access too, the price goes up exponentially.Since Figma’s user base is smaller than Adobe’s, they are able to listen to user feedback much more effectively. They even implemented a live chat within the program so users can ask for help or suggest features they’d like to see in the future. And Figma listens. Their team is always working to improve the app and adding new features that make the design process smoother.One of Figma’s latest features is the Tidy Up feature. This command works similarly to the alignment and space distribution tools but combines them into one. Once objects are aligned and distributed evenly, users can now uniformly control the spacing between each object, as well as rearrange the order of the objects seamlessly.

Just this summer, Figma announced added functionality that supports gifs and shortly after added the ability to auto-animate in prototyping. This is very important because auto-animate was the main advantage Adobe XD had on Figma.Another one of Figma’s recent updates is the Keyboard Shortcut guide, which users can set to the bottom of their window for reference. Figma highlights the shortcuts you’ve used already, helping you keep track of which shortcuts you don’t know yet.Perhaps the most impressive part is that Figma does all this while still managing to use less RAM than Photoshop. This is a huge plus for Figma, especially if you’re still using Photoshop or Illustrator at the same time. Since everything is cloud-based, the program uses very little RAM compared to any Adobe program. Instead, speed is more dependent on bandwidth.

Better For Developers And Teams

From a developer’s perspective, Figma adds a whole new level of productivity to the web developing process. Every measurement you could need is only a click and hover away.For example, if you have an object selected and hold ⌥ (alt on PC), Figma will show you the distance between the selected object and the object you’re hovering on down to the hundredth of a pixel. This is useful because it gives you a sense of how much anti-aliasing will occur in the image export. Figma is vector-based, so everything scales accordingly.Figma works on all operating systems. Whether you’re working on Mac, Windows, Linux, or all three simultaneously, Figma will show changes to your shared document in real-time. This allows multiple people to work on a single file at once, maximizing both efficiency and organization.Since everything is cloud-based, Figma constantly auto-saves your work as well as the previous versions. This means that any file that a designer imports into Figma can be exported by a developer on a different machine, across the room or across the world. It’s especially ideal for an agency setting.If you’ve ever been a part of a website overhaul, you know one of the most challenging aspects is communicating between design and development how the site is meant to work. Figma’s prototyping allows designers to map out exactly how a website will function, including links to other pages, sticky elements, transition effects, and side scrolls. This shows developers exactly how each element on the page should behave and minimizes confusion during the developer handoff. Figma’s comment feature allows any user with access to a file to comment, reply, and tag other users on any pixel in the Figma file, which speeds up back-and-forth Q&A about functionality.Figma is able to import many Sketch files pretty seamlessly, so if a designer hands you a Sketch file you can collaborate on design/development with any Sketch user. This is especially important because Sketch is only supported on Mac.Figma provides CSS, iOS, and Android attributes for elements such as color (HEX, RGB, HSB, CSS), size, and effects (drop shadow, inner shadow, background blur). This saves a lot of typing.One of Figma’s most-loved features is its responsive grid, which allows you to constrain certain elements to that grid. When the frame is resized, elements will be adjusted according to what part of the frame they are constrained to (top, bottom, left, right, center).The Component feature allows designers to designate various different states for buttons, making many different copies that can be controlled by one. This shows the developers all the different states of an object in one convenient package.Figma makes exporting easy. You can highlight any number of objects, groups, or frames and apply export settings to them individually as if they were color layers. This way you can export multiple elements as JPGs, PNGs, and SVGs, at a variety of sizes (@.05x, @2x, @4x) all with one click.Everything you need to start designing can be found in Figma’s free plan, although for just $12 a month you get access to team libraries, unlimited projects, unlimited version history, and private files.If you’re a web designer who is still using Photoshop for UI design, you should give Figma a try.You can use the app through your favorite browser or download a desktop app if you prefer. Using the web browser eliminates the need to manually update (they usually update a couple of times a month), but updating on the desktop version is as simple as restarting the app. Once you have an account, you can log into the browser version anywhere there’s internet access.While there’s nothing inherently wrong with using Photoshop to design websites, we’re all about tools that can improve our efficiency and help us deliver more of exactly what our clients are looking for. For us, cloud-based design apps help do that, and they’re certainly worth looking at as an alternative to Photoshop for your future design projects.