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Figma is not forever.
And inVision is now gone.
Goodbye inVision! Who’s next?
Another design tool used by millions just announced they’re shutting down.
If you’ve been designing in the 2010–2017 era you most probably used inVision.
We used it at our company for 99% of all projects, including very complex ones for Fortune500 companies.
And now they’re going out of business.
There may be a lot of reasons for it — for one Figma’s dominance on the market pushed out other tools. Lack of updates and innovation was probably another problem.
They launched a highly anticipated prototyping/animation tool called inVision Studio which I loved, just to leave it without updates for years.
Even when it launched, it was way better in prototyping animation than what Figma’s smart animate does right now.
Being great at something but without the persistence is not enough.
But they weren’t the only ones.
Macromedia
We had our “Adobe — Figma” moment in the early 2000’s too.
Same thing happened to Macromedia Freehand in the early 2000’s along with Fireworks and Flash. Beloved, ahead-of-their-time design tools destroyed.
Being great at something but without the persistence is not enough.
XD?
Then when the Adobe-Figma deal was announced, Adobe stopped working on their XD app, which is now in some kind of weird limbo state.
Tools come and go and what you should really focus on is skills, not tools. That way you’ll be able to design even on paper, or in any tool that comes along in the future.
