Framer's New Killer Feature for Web Designers

So framer released an update and they showed us the direction that they are going. So now they have this thing that call is called design pages. Previously you you had essentially this view to have one page. This was one web page. You could design in it and inside of this canvas you could zoom in and out but you had only this one page. And if you had like a contact page, you would go to a different page. So these are like different separate pages, right? Now they have design pages which is just like Figma. Here you can have frames, right? And here you can design. This is not like the rest of the framer that you were designing a single page, a specific page. here you're designing whatever which is really cool. It's just like Figma. It's nothing new but it's new to framer and it exists now all in the same place. And once you are ready with a direction let's say you make a bunch of designs then you put them together then you have like a frame that is ready to be uh to be developed. You are essentially here you can just uh right click on this and then you say create web page and here you have under pages a new page that is that frame that you were working on. So it's kind of like you're designing but at developing at the same time but in a free form canvas. So all they added is a free form canvas where you have the same features. It's nothing new. it just in a new environment and it just makes sense. I was surprised that they didn't have it and this shows their direction. They are going after Figma really bad. They want the whole piece of the cake. They don't want just the development part. They are not saying, "Oh, hey designers, you can design your portfolio directly inside a framer." No, they are saying like you can design inside a framer. It's great for iterations. It's great for, you know, coming up with lots of iterations and being like, "Right, this is the one. Assign that as the contact page." I don't think it will necessarily kill Figma because remember more than just web designers use Figma. You use it for your thumbnails, right? Um, good friend of mine, Susie, she she's in she's app, so she's doing more she's doing app design in it. And this isn't going to replace all of that. This is just taking the web designers and giving them the complete end toend flow for web designers. So, that's really great. And I think what the what this what this is great for, you know, the classic meme of designers coming up with some crazy frigin animation or like this or that or skewing and doing all these things and developers are like how the hell am I going to create that you know? Yeah. That's because in part due to the fact that because Figma is so well uh featured to support app designers as well as web designers as well as graphic designers, it's going to give you things that you can do that you cannot do in the web. And that's going to that's a point of friction and a point of um apprehension for designers thinking well what can I and and designers are thinking well I wish I knew more about development because I don't know what you can and can't do. Yeah, this is like Figma light where you can only do things that can work on the web. You can only do you know that everything you're designing in here is going to be for the web. Granted, you you might be able to get a little bit clever, but ultimately you you pretty certain it's going to work for the web, whereas yeah, Figma is a bit more daunting because certainly blend modes are a bit of a pain and blend modes are not good for for web. And if you and I see a lot of people use blend modes that you could achieve through other means that don't use something that's so graphically or or processor intensive as a blend mode as an example and 100% free unlimited pages unlimited canvas 100% free. So framer of um they're going after the web they're trying to seize the web designers from Yes. from Figma for sure. Yeah, definitely. This is part of a larger conversation on my show, Command AI, which we stream live every single week. We discuss the news and all things related to AI in the world of design and web. Catch us next week and join in the banter.