Nothing is finished in Figma

At Theorem I lived on the receiving end of the design file. I built HTML5 rich media ad units on a platform called Celtra, turning other people's designs into the thing that actually shipped, and it shaped everything I think about this job.

What I learned there is that a file is a proposal. A very good proposal, often a beautiful one, describing a product that does not exist yet and may never exist in that form.

The gap nobody owns

Between an approved design and a shipped product there is a long stretch of decisions the file did not answer. What happens when the name is forty characters. What the empty state says on day one. What the error looks like when the connection drops halfway.

Somebody decides all of that. If the designer has moved on, it is an engineer at six in the evening making a reasonable guess. Do that a few hundred times and what ships is a cousin of what was designed.

The product is not the file. It is what a person actually receives.

Speaking developer

The most valuable thing I can do on a project is be genuinely available while it is being built. Not in a review two weeks later. In the thread, that afternoon, when the question is small and cheap to answer.

Reading the code helps, but it is not really about technical skill. It is about knowing which of my decisions are load bearing and which are preferences I should drop immediately so the team can move. A designer who treats every pixel as sacred gets ignored, correctly.

The trade

So I do not consider a project delivered when the file is approved. I consider it delivered when someone who does not work on it uses it and gets what they came for.

That is slower, and it does not photograph well. A case study made of build threads and edge cases is far less impressive than a grid of polished screens, which is one reason our profession keeps rewarding the file over the product. But the file is not what anyone uses. I will take the trade.