Designers don’t have a natural urge to branch.
It’s undoubtedly spectacular that designers can tinker around in their Figma files within a branch these days. During Sketch days, branching of a file was only possible via Abstract, and companies had to shell out an extra license fee for Abstract integration reluctantly. And practically without Abstract, design worked in a vacuum within Sketch. But those days are long gone. Figma now has strong branching capabilities for designers to manage their changes and put them up for review once they are done working on them. But Figma’s branching capabilities are not fully matured.
Branching in design tools is essentially a borrowed concept from tools like Github, where developers often branch from master before they start to work on a new feature. But to designers, branching not only allows them to work without disturbing existing work but also provides a safe space to explore and iterate without attracting judgment.
Figma recently lost it’s Beta tag for its branching feature, and added a bunch of features like branch review and suggestions. If you are unaware of how branching works in Figma, then you can check out these deep dive videos by the Figma team on their channel.
Ok, back to the maturity of Figma branching as a feature.
When Figma announced the removal of the Beta tag, it meant the team had solved all the bugs, there won’t be many hotfixes in the future, and designers won’t lose their work in the progress of branching and merging. But the team at Figma left a lot of open-ended items still in their feature release. So let’s discuss them one by one:
