design Tag

Adobe announced they were buying Figma two weeks ago, and most of the reactions I’ve seen about it since then were pretty negative.

Now it sounds like designers (and developers) are turning to an open source Figma competitor called Penpot.

From TechCrunch:

Even before the Adobe-Figma news hit, Penpot had been making a name for itself. Launched a year ago, the startup has seen tens of thousands of downloads and 15,000 “stars” on GitHub. The 10,000 companies among its active users include Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, Tencent, ByteDance and Mozilla.

Before September 15, Penpot’s CEO and co-founder Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz said that sign-ups were growing at around 40% per month: after Adobe’s news, that figure ballooned to 5,600%, and has stayed consistent since then. On-premise deployments have also grown 400%.

I’m happy about this part. There definitely needs to be competition in apps/services like these.

But TechCrunch also reported:

The company, based out of Madrid, has picked up $8 million in a round led by Decibel out of the U.S., with participation also from Athos and, significantly, several individuals notable for their roles in creative and developer ecosystems.

I’m not so happy about this part.

I like to see smaller organizations get the money they need to succeed, but at what cost? Why is it so common for businesses to leave the important part (revenue) to the very end and then accept financing that is guaranteed to push them to make decisions they wouldn’t have otherwise? Like, you know, selling to a bigger company for a billion dollar exit for example.

More about this on Mastodon (including responses from the Penpot CEO).

I’m really into The Expanse.

I’ve heard of the book series since before the show was announced, but I didn’t actually get around to reading it until after I’ve seen a few seasons of the show. I used to read on my commute a lot right before COVID hit, but my pace really slowed down a lot since I don’t regularly sit on trains for long periods of time anymore.

Anyway, one of the many things I really like about the show is their vision of all the tech we’ll be using in the future. As a tech guy who’s into sci-fi, I end up seeing a lot of devices/interfaces/tech in shows that either don’t make sense or don’t look good or realistic in any way. The Expanse manages to do such a good job with the technical details.

I just came across the website HUDS+GUIS, which talks about different interfaces from films, games, concepts, etc. They just did an article on UI design in The Expanse. It’s definitely worth a look if you’re into future tech and design. And The Expanse is definitely worth a watch if you like sci-fi.