When my team moved from Figma to Cursor, we gave things up on purpose. In this episode, I walk through the ledger: lost visual history, the comment threads that held our why, a rejected pull request, and what we gained by designing with production code instead of a picture. |
When your design team trades the canvas for code, what actually disappears, and is what you get back worth more than what you lost?
Someone on my team looked at something I designed recently and said, “Hey, this is amazing!”
I said, “Thanks.”
But in the back of my head, a little voice said, “You didn’t actually make any of this.”
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How do you handle a compliment like that?
Sure, I described the problem. I steered it and made the calls. But my hands didn’t make the thing everybody was complimenting.
A while back, my friend Chris sent me a DM that kicked off this whole season: “Do you feel like you lost your identity as a designer?”
I said no without thinking. But the longer I think about it, the less sure I am. Part of what keeps tripping me up is this:
Before software, design was markers, paper, and art boards. The designer drew. Someone else directed. “Make it warmer. No, bigger. Try it more like this.”
That someone was the art director. Or the client. The person designers spent entire careers complaining about.
Now AI does the drawing, and I do the directing.
So what is a designer?
⇢ The hand that moves the pixels?
⇢ Or the person who describes the problem, picks the right option out of twenty, and knows when it’s done?
If it’s the direction, I might be more of a designer than ever. If it’s the hand, I might not be a designer anymore.
In episode four, I finally take on Chris’s question for real. We get into:
⇢ The craft I was proudest of, and why its home is gone
⇢ Why the design file always felt more like ours than the shipped product
⇢ What a portfolio even looks like when there’s no file
⇢ The career unease that losing Figma pulled the covers off of
Where do you land? Hand or direction? Hit reply and tell me.
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You iterated, pivoted, circle-backed, and made it out of Q4 (barely).
You’ve earned a Merit-ish Badge!
Choose from four sets:
• Soft Skills, Sharp Tongue
• Cult of Figma Initiation
• Pixel Pusher Survivor Kit
• Field Notes & Frayed Nerves
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They don't teach this stuff in school
Learn the things they left off the syllabus.
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