Designing on the live site
Figma is great for pitching. It's a lousy place to finish a design. Here's why we build first, polish in browser.
Here's a thing I've stopped doing: designing entire sites in Figma before a single line of code is written.
It's not that Figma is bad — it's a brilliant pitching tool, and a lot of the early thinking in a project still starts there. But at some point, the static mockup becomes the problem you're solving, instead of the actual site. You move pixels around in a file your client can't use, on a canvas that doesn't know what a breakpoint is, styled in a fake version of the typeface that'll behave differently in their browser.
Then comes the hand-off. The developer (often me, a week later) has to reconstruct every choice in code, guessing intent, discovering the layout doesn't reflow the way Figma suggested, and re-making decisions that should have been made with the live constraints in view.
We skip that now.
What we do instead
Every project starts with a moodboard conversation, then jumps almost immediately into the browser. Usually within 48 hours of the kickoff call you have a live staging URL. It's ugly. Real ugly, the first week. But it renders your actual content, at your actual viewport, with your actual fonts, on the device you'll use to look at it.
Every time we make a change, you can see it in your pocket.
The thing Figma can't give you is what your site feels like at 23:47 on a Tuesday, on your phone, while you're trying to explain your business to your cousin.
What changes, qualitatively
- Design decisions get faster because you can feel them, not squint at them.
- The edge cases show up early — long names, missing images, awkward line breaks, clumsy hover states — instead of all arriving in the last week before launch.
- Copy gets real. There's no "Lorem ipsum" when the page is live; you'll write actual copy (or we'll help) because the hole is obvious.
- The client participates more. Sending a Figma link gets one kind of feedback. Sending a URL and saying "try booking a call with me on this, tell me how it feels" gets a different kind of feedback entirely.
What doesn't change
The ambition. The thinking. The craft. We still obsess over a type scale, a system, a hierarchy. But we do it at the scale and rendering engine it'll actually live in.
So that's the rule now: Figma for ideas, browser for answers.