Years ago, I started designing websites, flyers, business cards, logos, t-shirts, and just about anything you can imagine. It was a lot of fun, and I had opportunity after opportunity to stretch myself and grow. 

My process evolved over time. I kept experimenting, learning from others, and generally just tried to figure out how to get an idea from my head or my client’s head onto the digital page. 

That forced struggle, the process of moving an idea forward, allowing it to improve, and shipping it, was and is so crucial for me as a designer to figure out. 

The good news is I’m still figuring it out. Almost twenty years later, I continue to iterate on it, tweak things, and figure out how to keep the spark of an idea alive (or shut it down early) as it moves forward. 

When I took my first graphic design class, I had a fantastic teacher. She helped me land my first job at a screen printing shop and gave me the tools and time to refine how I created things. I’d already been interested in design before that, learning tools on my own and spending countless hours tinkering with ideas. 

But working with Jane, my teacher, I was able to push forward much faster and understand how to make things in a way that mattered to clients. 

Because of my early tinkering on my own, I’d become proficient at using Macromedia Flash (before Adobe bought it) for graphic design, logo design, illustration, and even animation. I even built a website in it. 

I knew the tool inside and out and always opened it first regardless of the need. It was the hammer, and every problem I saw was the nail. 

Jane gently encouraged me to try tools more suited to the purpose. For a booklet, she showed me InDesign; for a flyer, she encouraged Illustrator, etc. I learned these tools and started to understand the nuance of them. I will say, to this day, I don’t get Photoshop. I’ve tried a dozen times, but the way it functions never clicked for my brain, and I still eschew it for nearly any other tool on offer. This is probably because I think more in terms of vector than raster. 

So I shifted tools, I started to find the right software for the job, and moved forward. I chose Illustrator for graphic design and print design and learned its nuances and weird intricacies. If a tool has two types of mouse cursors, it’s probably a bit complex. Because of how long it took me to learn Illustrator, a pattern emerged. I used it for logo design, graphic design, illustration, and web design. 

That last one became a bit of an issue. I refused to switch to Photoshop, which at the time was the main tool for Web Design. But in a way, I’m grateful. My brain could only think in vector, so for over a decade, I forced it to bend to my whims as I designed websites. It was janky, but it worked. 

When Figma finally came along, and I naturally turned it down and went back to Illustrator, another colleague gently walked me through its uses. He sat me down and showed me, in very excited terms, why it was better than Sketch, InVision, and all the rest. It clicked, and I switched.

And now, almost a decade past that point, I love Figma. I now use it for app design, web design, some graphic design, and some illustration. Illustrator still holds the spot when I need to get real graphic design work done, but overall, Figma is the main tool on my computer that I use for design. 

Now, back to the title of this post. It took a while to get here, but I think the journey is important to share. I love Figma, and each day feels like I’m learning something new in the tool. 

However, I don’t start with it for design. I start all my designs with pen and paper (or the more modern iPad + Freeform). 

Doing that helps my brain reconnect with the earliest ways of design that I learned. Moving my hand across a paper freehand (I wish that app still existed), feeling out the problem, making mistakes, and thinking quickly. I can’t do that in Figma, despite almost a decade of use. 

It’s too easy in a software tool to tinker with spacing, fonts, colors, and components. At the early stage of a project (and repeatedly throughout it), you need the ability to just think, to erase, to draw over earlier ideas, and to form something from nothing. That doesn’t happen, at least for me, in a tool like Figma. 

I experimented with Balsamiq for a while, and it’s the closest I’ve come to software that mimics what I’m wanting, but still, freehand drawing is the best. 

So, if you’re like me, it’s okay to embrace new tools and technology. I think that’s great, and I hope I never stop doing that. But along the way, I’ve started to find a process that works for me despite the tech, so that when Figma gets replaced by something better, I’ll be ready for it.