How Figma helped us to scale our Design team

Where it all began…

Since the demise of Fireworks, I had done most of my design work in Illustrator and Photoshop. Then, whilst working at Skyscanner, this new tool called Sketch was gaining popularity. Being an early-adopter, I was eager to try it and after making the switch, I never looked back — until recently…

Working in siloed squads with little need to collaborate with other designers, and before Design Systems were in full swing, working on an isolated file shared across Dropbox seemed to work just fine.

Moving to TravelPerk to lead the design team, I found myself working across many aspects of the product, constantly syncing and sharing assets with other designers. For a short while, we were using Github to keep track of our files and changes, but git is not great for differentiating between binary files. We then attended a local Meetup to hear about how to version control design files and discovered Folio.

An example of the Folio interface, our first adoption of a visual, version-controlled workflow.

It “worked” for a time, though would sometimes hang or leave us wondering where certain versions had went. It was definitely an improvement on our previous workflow but was far from perfect — or fast.

Then, when Sketch introduced it’s new text-based format for it’s proprietary files, it meant that differentiation between versions were now…