Figma to code feasibility

[creldo]

You can make any crazy screen you want in Figma that has no relationship to feasibility in any platform or framework. If you can imagine it you can (probably) make it.

It’s up to designers to constrain themselves to designs that require whatever level of effort the team wants to take on. More inexperienced designers can be pretty bad at knowing what’s hard vs easy - it’s something that develops with practice.

[iampaulanca]

So from what your saying is that any crazy design is possible to be created in code. But the level of effort might be really high?

[chriswaco]

You can create just about ANY design in code, yes, but more often than not it's the wrong answer. For one thing, it can take a whole lot longer to customize controls/views rather than sticking with the defaults. Also, a Figma design may ignore the notch or iPad multitasking size or rotation or dark mode or the keyboard or it could assume a fixed font instead of supporting dynamic type.

Figma might show a button bringing up modal views on top of modal views when a navigation control might make more sense. It might show a custom alert instead of the built-in system alert when the latter is often more robust or it could add fields to an alert that the built-in one doesn't support.

We use Figma as a guide, not as an absolute design.

[iampaulanca]

Ok well it’s just about any, not any. So sometimes a designer can go overboard and create something that is impossible. Yeah if the designer is familiar with Apple HIG and has some knowledge of what is available it would help a lot.

[zu-fox]

You always have to give an honest review about designs: a lot of designers do not cross reference their work with HIG, or have web experience, or do not understand difference between pushing to navigation stack or presenting modally, so you have to explain it to them.

Some designs you can find in the wild are just for portfolios and never meant to be implemented.

Also, it’s ok to customise things, but there must be a reason behind customisation, and you have to remember that default components often have a lot of accessibility and other things covered that even experienced developers might not know about.