The Promise of XD
Before Figma became the default, there was Adobe XD.
For a while, XD felt like Adobe had finally understood what interface design needed. It was not Photoshop pretending to design apps. It was not Illustrator stretched into a prototyping tool. It was focused, quick, and approachable. You could sketch a screen, connect a flow, test a prototype, and begin to feel the shape of an application before anyone wrote a line of code.
I remember using XD to design an app called Compass. It was built around outdoor adventurers: hunters, hikers, campers, and fishermen. The idea combined location tracking, saved routes, state hunting and fishing booklets, emergency tools, and a Bluetooth mesh-style communication concept that could help people reach one another in remote areas.
The app was ambitious, but XD made it feel possible.
That was the quiet power of the tool. It lowered the distance between an idea and an experience. It let a designer move through screens, decisions, pathways, and interactions without feeling like the software was getting in the way.
XD was not perfect. Its integration with the larger Adobe ecosystem never felt fully complete. But it was good enough to suggest a future. For designers already living inside Creative Cloud, it felt like the missing room in the house.
The Future Moved Somewhere Else
Then Figma happened.
What made the transition interesting was that Figma did not feel completely foreign. Moving from XD to Figma was not like opening ZBrush after years in Photoshop, or learning Blender after living in Cinema 4D and After Effects. It did not feel like entering a different philosophy of software.
It felt like stepping into a more complete version of the same emerging language.
Artboards. Components. Prototypes. Shared files. Design systems. Commenting. Collaboration. Handoff. The tools were different, but the grammar felt familiar. XD and Figma, almost without saying it out loud, had helped establish a new standard for how interface design software should behave.
That may be one reason Figma’s rise felt so natural. It did not ask designers to abandon everything they understood. It gave them the version of modern product design that Adobe XD had pointed toward but never fully became.
And that is what made Adobe’s attempted acquisition of Figma so emotionally complicated.
The Merger That Made Too Much Sense
When Adobe announced it planned to acquire Figma, the logic was obvious.
Adobe owned much of the creative stack. Figma owned the collaborative product design layer. Designers were already moving between Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, XD, and Figma depending on the needs of a project. For teams that lived inside Adobe subscriptions, the idea of Figma becoming part of that world had an immediate appeal.
It sounded simpler.
One fewer tool to justify. One fewer subscription to explain. One more bridge between brand, interface, campaign, motion, and product design. For people who had learned XD and then moved into Figma, the acquisition could feel like a natural correction. Adobe had lost the center of interface design, and now it was buying the tool that had won it.
But the convenience was also the threat.
Because Adobe is not just another software company to designers. Adobe is infrastructure. It is the landlord of creative work. It owns the rooms where designers edit photographs, build identities, draw systems, composite images, animate sequences, package files, export assets, and archive years of professional memory.
So when Adobe tries to buy a tool like Figma, designers do not only ask what new features might arrive.
They ask what might disappear.
The Memory of Tools Left Behind
The fear around the Figma deal was not that Adobe would ruin it overnight. The fear was more subtle and more familiar.
A beloved tool can be acquired and slowly lose priority. A product can remain alive but stop feeling urgent. A service can be moved into a separate subscription. A once-active community can keep waiting for updates that never arrive. A tool can survive in name while its original energy fades.
Designers have long memories about software because software shapes the way they think. Adobe Muse, Fireworks, Flash, Mixamo, XD, Substance 3D, and other products all sit differently in that memory, but together they form a pattern designers recognize. Not every acquired or Adobe-owned tool vanishes. Not every product is abandoned. But once a tool becomes part of a larger corporate portfolio, its future depends on priorities the creative community cannot see and cannot control.
That was the anxiety underneath the Figma acquisition.
Figma was not just another application. It was where product teams worked, argued, revised, presented, commented, prototyped, and made decisions together. It was not only a design surface. It was a meeting room, a workshop, a whiteboard, a source of truth.
To fold that into Adobe was to raise a larger question: would Figma remain a living product shaped by the culture that built it, or would it become another asset inside the Adobe machine?
XD Was the Warning
The most uncomfortable part of the story is Adobe XD itself.
XD had once felt like Adobe’s answer to modern product design. It gave many designers their first serious experience with app prototyping. It made interface work feel native to the Adobe world. For people like me, it was the tool that made an ambitious product idea feel tangible.
Then it stalled.
That stagnation changed how the Figma deal felt. Adobe was not simply buying a competitor. It was buying the future of the category where its own product had lost momentum. For some designers, that sounded practical. For others, it sounded like confirmation that Adobe could not build its way into the center of modern interface design, so it would purchase the company that had.
That is why the merger produced such a strange emotional split.
Part of the industry wanted the convenience.
Part of the industry wanted Figma protected from the convenience.
Why Regulators Stepped In
Regulators saw the issue through a different lens, but they were responding to the same basic concern: control.
Adobe announced the $20 billion deal in 2022. By the end of 2023, the acquisition had collapsed after regulatory pressure in the UK and Europe. Competition authorities were concerned that Adobe buying Figma could reduce competition in the market for interactive product design tools and broader creative software.
For designers, the concern was personal and practical. For regulators, it was structural. But both questions pointed in the same direction.
How much of the design stack should one company control?
That question mattered because creative software is not interchangeable. A designer can change tools, but not without cost. Tools contain workflows, habits, shortcuts, files, teams, systems, libraries, and years of accumulated trust. The market may describe them as products. Designers experience them as environments.
The Relief Was Not Simple
When the deal fell apart, the reaction was not pure celebration.
There was disappointment. Figma inside Adobe could have made certain workflows easier. It could have reduced friction for teams already paying for Creative Cloud. It could have connected product design more cleanly to brand, motion, image-making, and campaign work. For many designers, that possibility was genuinely attractive.
But there was also relief.
Figma stayed independent. The tool that had become central to modern product design did not disappear into the same ecosystem that had let XD fade. The design community kept a little more distance between its daily working life and Adobe’s larger business logic.
Still, the collapse did not solve the deeper problem. It only preserved the tension.
Designers still live inside rented rooms. They build their careers in software they do not own. They trust tools with their habits, ideas, archives, and collaborations, knowing those tools can change direction whenever the company behind them changes its priorities.
What the Failed Merger Revealed
The Adobe × Figma collapse was not only about monopoly power. It was about the emotional contract between designers and the tools they use every day.
XD mattered because it gave designers a doorway into modern app design. Figma mattered because it became the room everyone actually gathered in. Adobe’s attempted acquisition mattered because it forced the industry to ask whether convenience was worth surrendering another part of the creative stack to one company.
That is why the deal felt both exciting and unsettling. Designers wanted the integration. They wanted the simplicity. They wanted fewer subscriptions, cleaner handoffs, and a workflow that made sense.
They also wanted Figma to remain free from the fate they feared most: not sudden destruction, but slow absorption.
A tool does not have to die to be lost. Sometimes it only has to stop belonging to the people who made it matter.
The Promise of XD
Before Figma became the default, there was Adobe XD.
For a while, XD felt like Adobe had finally understood what interface design needed. It was not Photoshop pretending to design apps. It was not Illustrator stretched into a prototyping tool. It was focused, quick, and approachable. You could sketch a screen, connect a flow, test a prototype, and begin to feel the shape of an application before anyone wrote a line of code.
I remember using XD to design an app called Compass. It was built around outdoor adventurers: hunters, hikers, campers, and fishermen. The idea combined location tracking, saved routes, state hunting and fishing booklets, emergency tools, and a Bluetooth mesh-style communication concept that could help people reach one another in remote areas.
The app was ambitious, but XD made it feel possible.
That was the quiet power of the tool. It lowered the distance between an idea and an experience. It let a designer move through screens, decisions, pathways, and interactions without feeling like the software was getting in the way.
XD was not perfect. Its integration with the larger Adobe ecosystem never felt fully complete. But it was good enough to suggest a future. For designers already living inside Creative Cloud, it felt like the missing room in the house.
The Future Moved Somewhere Else
Then Figma happened.
What made the transition interesting was that Figma did not feel completely foreign. Moving from XD to Figma was not like opening ZBrush after years in Photoshop, or learning Blender after living in Cinema 4D and After Effects. It did not feel like entering a different philosophy of software.
It felt like stepping into a more complete version of the same emerging language.
Artboards. Components. Prototypes. Shared files. Design systems. Commenting. Collaboration. Handoff. The tools were different, but the grammar felt familiar. XD and Figma, almost without saying it out loud, had helped establish a new standard for how interface design software should behave.
That may be one reason Figma’s rise felt so natural. It did not ask designers to abandon everything they understood. It gave them the version of modern product design that Adobe XD had pointed toward but never fully became.
And that is what made Adobe’s attempted acquisition of Figma so emotionally complicated.
The Merger That Made Too Much Sense
When Adobe announced it planned to acquire Figma, the logic was obvious.
Adobe owned much of the creative stack. Figma owned the collaborative product design layer. Designers were already moving between Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, XD, and Figma depending on the needs of a project. For teams that lived inside Adobe subscriptions, the idea of Figma becoming part of that world had an immediate appeal.
It sounded simpler.
One fewer tool to justify. One fewer subscription to explain. One more bridge between brand, interface, campaign, motion, and product design. For people who had learned XD and then moved into Figma, the acquisition could feel like a natural correction. Adobe had lost the center of interface design, and now it was buying the tool that had won it.
But the convenience was also the threat.
Because Adobe is not just another software company to designers. Adobe is infrastructure. It is the landlord of creative work. It owns the rooms where designers edit photographs, build identities, draw systems, composite images, animate sequences, package files, export assets, and archive years of professional memory.
So when Adobe tries to buy a tool like Figma, designers do not only ask what new features might arrive.
They ask what might disappear.
The Memory of Tools Left Behind
The fear around the Figma deal was not that Adobe would ruin it overnight. The fear was more subtle and more familiar.
A beloved tool can be acquired and slowly lose priority. A product can remain alive but stop feeling urgent. A service can be moved into a separate subscription. A once-active community can keep waiting for updates that never arrive. A tool can survive in name while its original energy fades.
Designers have long memories about software because software shapes the way they think. Adobe Muse, Fireworks, Flash, Mixamo, XD, Substance 3D, and other products all sit differently in that memory, but together they form a pattern designers recognize. Not every acquired or Adobe-owned tool vanishes. Not every product is abandoned. But once a tool becomes part of a larger corporate portfolio, its future depends on priorities the creative community cannot see and cannot control.
That was the anxiety underneath the Figma acquisition.
Figma was not just another application. It was where product teams worked, argued, revised, presented, commented, prototyped, and made decisions together. It was not only a design surface. It was a meeting room, a workshop, a whiteboard, a source of truth.
To fold that into Adobe was to raise a larger question: would Figma remain a living product shaped by the culture that built it, or would it become another asset inside the Adobe machine?
XD Was the Warning
The most uncomfortable part of the story is Adobe XD itself.
XD had once felt like Adobe’s answer to modern product design. It gave many designers their first serious experience with app prototyping. It made interface work feel native to the Adobe world. For people like me, it was the tool that made an ambitious product idea feel tangible.
Then it stalled.
That stagnation changed how the Figma deal felt. Adobe was not simply buying a competitor. It was buying the future of the category where its own product had lost momentum. For some designers, that sounded practical. For others, it sounded like confirmation that Adobe could not build its way into the center of modern interface design, so it would purchase the company that had.
That is why the merger produced such a strange emotional split.
Part of the industry wanted the convenience.
Part of the industry wanted Figma protected from the convenience.
Why Regulators Stepped In
Regulators saw the issue through a different lens, but they were responding to the same basic concern: control.
Adobe announced the $20 billion deal in 2022. By the end of 2023, the acquisition had collapsed after regulatory pressure in the UK and Europe. Competition authorities were concerned that Adobe buying Figma could reduce competition in the market for interactive product design tools and broader creative software.
For designers, the concern was personal and practical. For regulators, it was structural. But both questions pointed in the same direction.
How much of the design stack should one company control?
That question mattered because creative software is not interchangeable. A designer can change tools, but not without cost. Tools contain workflows, habits, shortcuts, files, teams, systems, libraries, and years of accumulated trust. The market may describe them as products. Designers experience them as environments.
The Relief Was Not Simple
When the deal fell apart, the reaction was not pure celebration.
There was disappointment. Figma inside Adobe could have made certain workflows easier. It could have reduced friction for teams already paying for Creative Cloud. It could have connected product design more cleanly to brand, motion, image-making, and campaign work. For many designers, that possibility was genuinely attractive.
But there was also relief.
Figma stayed independent. The tool that had become central to modern product design did not disappear into the same ecosystem that had let XD fade. The design community kept a little more distance between its daily working life and Adobe’s larger business logic.
Still, the collapse did not solve the deeper problem. It only preserved the tension.
Designers still live inside rented rooms. They build their careers in software they do not own. They trust tools with their habits, ideas, archives, and collaborations, knowing those tools can change direction whenever the company behind them changes its priorities.
What the Failed Merger Revealed
The Adobe × Figma collapse was not only about monopoly power. It was about the emotional contract between designers and the tools they use every day.
XD mattered because it gave designers a doorway into modern app design. Figma mattered because it became the room everyone actually gathered in. Adobe’s attempted acquisition mattered because it forced the industry to ask whether convenience was worth surrendering another part of the creative stack to one company.
That is why the deal felt both exciting and unsettling. Designers wanted the integration. They wanted the simplicity. They wanted fewer subscriptions, cleaner handoffs, and a workflow that made sense.
They also wanted Figma to remain free from the fate they feared most: not sudden destruction, but slow absorption.
A tool does not have to die to be lost. Sometimes it only has to stop belonging to the people who made it matter.
(COMMENTARY)
