How Figma Dethroned Adobe: Part I
Browser first editing, collaborative design, and a feel that you just can't describe. Here's how Figma did it.
Photoshop wasn’t just some desktop app that super-skilled graphics designers used. Heck if you asked any random person, they likely knew of Photoshop, but nothing about how to use it, who created it, or anything else.
Regardless, its impact was so existential that the evolution of social media would look much different today without it. Photoshop wasn’t just some app. It was a verb - you didn’t “edit” an image, you photoshopped it. All those celebrities like Beyonce got exposed for editing their videos just a tad too much. Much lesser-known stories exist too. Zilla van den Born went viral back in 2014 for faking her trip through Asia, recreating photos of East Asia from her house and around her hometown of Amsterdam.
The term’s ubiquity conveyed the impact of the product, but also the company, Adobe. Ever since its early days, Adobe has dominated the photo, video, and design space growing to $238 billion in market cap while they were at it. Photoshop alone has over 40% with Adobe overall having comfortably more than 80% market share amongst enterprise use graphics software.
If you were to introduce a new product that stood a chance against Adobe, it had to be objectively better. That’s exactly what Figma did.
WebGL
Launched in 2011, WebGL established a new way for browsers to take advantage of the graphics capabilities of any device. Remember our post on NVIDIA? In their early days, OpenGL was the standard way for anyone to interact with a GPU. OpenGL provided an API that people could use to harness the power of their GPU.
Furthermore, OpenGL offered multiple language bindings, one of which was used to create WebGL in 2011. With WebGL, you could render high-performance 2D and 3D graphics through a browser.
This was a crazy breakthrough. Before WebGL, there was no way for cloud-based web apps to take advantage of the opportunities offered by a device’s GPU. That’s why if any software ever needed to work with a GPU, it would only be available as a desktop app. Consider Photoshop. Since it was a desktop app, it worked directly with the computer’s hardware to do what it needed.
Naturally, this meant that creativity wasn’t the only limiting factor for why Figma launched when it did. The tech was barely there. WebGL was a primitive version of browser-based graphics rendering. From 2018 and beyond, lower-level languages like WebAssembly and future versions of WebGL made browser rendering more robust.
Launching Figma
If people cannot create, then that’s a moral wrong. Our tools should make it simple enough so that everyone can be creative.
That was the gist of Bret Victor’s talk over 12 years ago, the very talk that inspired Dylan Field and Evan Wallace to quit their jobs and find a solution to their own issues with design tools. Dylan and Evan had previously worked in creative industries at Flipboard and Pixar, using design tools that they quickly got frustrated with. The software wasn’t intuitive, lacked collaborative features, and missed a sense of fluidity.
You’d think that VCs were fishing for a lean startup that launched asap, but Figma was funded in 2013, more than 3 years after they were first funded. Even though they started in 2012, it took more than 4 years before Figma launched to the public, as they worked to create a platform that had the right feel.
That may sound super ambiguous, but consider the engineering problems for a minute. Figma was trying to create a browser-based vector editing software using a brand-new rendering API. Eventually, that platform had to support simultaneous editing, which meant considering load and how to handle versioning.
But back to the feel - ambiguous - but if you see it, you’ll know it. To get that feel, Figma had to ensure that their platform maximized FPS but also supported lower end and older devices. It needed to beautiful everywhere it existed.
Product Led Growth
Long before the days of Figma, Notion, Slack, Dropbox, and the other numerous SaaS companies of the modern age, there was Oracle. Greg Isenberg’s post properly sums up their business model.
No one likes the landlord, but you gotta give them credit, they make a boatload of money. Today’s enterprise software companies choose to focus on letting the product sell itself. Figma’s equivalent of Oracle’s enterprise sales team is Figma’s engineering team. And by god, those engineers had a selling to do. Before they could get companies hooked on their product, they had to drastically change the fundamental pillar of every designer.
Tune in for next week’s post to discover how Figma changed the landscape of graphic design by focusing on product-led growth. We’ll even break down what product-led growth means. However, that’s all for today! If you enjoyed this piece covering Figma’s early days and the development of WebGL, hit the like button or drop a comment with your thoughts. Simply contact us by replying to this email if you have any insider takes or leave a comment on our Substack page!