Okay I admit, the subtitle was pretty bait - I do still think that Framer feels like something from the future. Let me explain..
History of design tools
Design tools go a way back, at least for me. Back in my undergraduate program, we were taught 'Dreamweaver' by Adobe, and that's about it. My brother introduced me to Sketch back in 2016, and I was blown away by the sheer simplicity in the GUI. Transitioning from something like Photoshop, Illustrator, or Sketch felt like driving a car from driving an airplane - crazy simple, almost no learning curve, and could be recommended to anyone. Soon by the end of 2018, I was exclusively working off Sketch and suddenly during my design internship of 2019 I heard my company was using something called 'Figma'. The way I was described Figma by my team then was like "Imagine Sketch, but it works like Google Docs" and I just didn't believe it. Fast forward today, I cannot imagine a design tool that does not support live collaboration or doesn't live on the web.
tl;dr design tools in the last 7 years have become easier to use, enabled building more complex experiences, and at the same time made it all happen on the web.
Enter Framer
Although the pace of evolution for the design tools was pretty fast to begin with, what Framer did still feels unreal to me. The fact that you can go from an idea to a live version of a website in under 5 minutes seems insane - and it works very very well too. It may not be super impressive to you if you already work in tech (or have been closely watching the space for the past 5+ years), but for someone who just wants to create a website to have their restaurant menu and details on a website, something like Framer can enable them to do of all that by themselves, without relying on any engineer at all.
The "good"
Its free - at least for hobby projects (with no custom domain and 1 CMS collection), but for something that is free and encourages people to create unlimited projects and learn the tool, its a pretty good deal.
It allows for a direct Figma import - For designers who are a tad intimidated to use the Framer canvas, you can just import all your Figma designs directly into Framer.
It does all the heavy lifting - or at least I think it does. From SEO, to accessibility, and speed, it outputs a pretty performant website.
It is very, very, very customizable - at first impressions, you might think of it as a landing page builder, but I have also started to see full companies building their product in Framer.
The 'meh'
Learning curve - understanding how variables work can be tricky (at least they were to me) since you need a good grasp on variables in order to build something as simple as a working 'navbar' component.
Canvas - its not like the Figma canvas, and I really really like the Figma canvas (that's the whole critique, yes)
Shortcuts - you might see a pattern here.. It doesn't use the same keyboard shortcuts as Figma for things like auto-layout, layer selection, etc.
Animations - while you do get some 'off-the-shelf' solutions, its still confusing to understand how do you do complex SVG animation (especially for components)
Summary
Again, not very comprehensive, and I am still in the process of exploring what this tool can do - but you can see from the critique how petty it is. Partly, because the tool is so good that I ran out of critiquing points. But truly, Framer feels like a tile from the future, and someone on twitter summarized this extremely well, which makes me excited for the future [Link to the tweet]
