Tag: educational

You know that feeling when you find an old USB drive and discover files from apps that literally don’t exist anymore? Yeah, that’s the design tool graveyard for you. Every few years, tools that seemed unstoppable just… vanish. And honestly? The stories behind their disappearances are way more fascinating than you’d think.

The data doesn’t lie, we’ve witnessed some of the most dramatic tool transitions in software history. Between 2015 and 2025, the entire design tools market exploded from $2.1 billion to a projected $13.8 billion, but most of the original players got buried along the way.

Let’s dig into the digital graveyard and see what we can learn from these fallen giants.

When Adobe Fireworks Got Fired by Adobe

Back in the early 2000s, if you were doing web design, you lived in Fireworks. This wasn’t some random tool; it had over 2 million web designers at its peak. While Photoshop was busy being a photo editor and Illustrator was doing its vector thing, Fireworks was the only tool actually built for screen design.

The wild part? Fireworks could handle both raster and vector work seamlessly. You could slice images for HTML export, create clickable hotspots, and build actual prototypes. In 2009, it commanded a solid 15% market share in the design tools space. But here’s where it gets messy Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005 and suddenly had two tools doing similar things.

By May 2013, Adobe just… pulled the plug. Their reasoning? “Overlap with other Adobe products.” Translation: “Why maintain three design tools when we can just make people use Photoshop and Illustrator?” The design community was not happy. Reddit threads from that day are still painful to read one designer literally posted “Good night, sweet prince”

But get this Adobe kept selling it even after discontinuing development. Talk about milking a dead cow. Today, that 0.04% market share is basically digital archaeology.

FreeHand: The Vector Tool That Could’ve Been King

Before Illustrator became the default, FreeHand was the scrappy underdog that illustrators absolutely swore by. We’re talking about 500,000+ passionate illustrators who argued it was faster, more intuitive, and less bloated than anything Adobe had.

FreeHand’s text handling was legendary. Multi-page documents, linked columns, precision that made Illustrator look clunky. At its peak in 2003, it held 25% of the vector illustration market. But then Adobe swooped in, bought Macromedia, and boom FreeHand became a casualty of corporate strategy.

The Federal Trade Commission actually forced Adobe to sell FreeHand back to prevent monopolization in 1994. But when Adobe acquired Macromedia again in 2005? Game over. By 2007, FreeHand was officially dead.

The loyalty was insane though. Even years after discontinuation, FreeHand users were filing antitrust lawsuits and petitioning for its revival. When a tool fits your brain that perfectly, letting go is brutal.

Balsamiq: When Sketchy Was Actually Good

Remember when wireframes looked intentionally rough? That was Balsamiq’s whole thing. In a world obsessed over pixel-perfect mockups, Balsamiq said “Nah, let’s keep it sketchy so people focus on functionality, not fonts.”

The strategy was genius. Product managers, developers, and designers could throw together screens in minutes. The hand-drawn aesthetic screamed “This is early, let’s discuss flow, not polish.” By 2014, Balsamiq owned 40% of the wireframing market.

But here’s what killed it: the rise of integrated platforms. Tools like Figma and Adobe XD started offering wireframe-to-high-fidelity workflows without platform switching. Suddenly, Balsamiq felt like an extra step nobody wanted to take.

The wireframe tools market is actually growing, projected to hit $2.5 billion by 2033 with a 9.4% CAGR. But that growth is going to integrated platforms, not specialized wireframe tools. Balsamiq still exists, but with less than 5% market share, it’s basically on life support.

Framer Classic: When Designers Learned to Code (Briefly)

Before Framer became a no-code website builder, Framer Classic was this insane code-driven prototyping tool. If you knew a little JavaScript, you could create prototypes that felt completely real not just screen-to-screen transitions, but fully functional, dynamic interfaces.

The learning curve was brutal, but the payoff was massive. We’re talking about 100,000+ developer-designers who could impress stakeholders with prototypes that actually worked. At its peak in 2017, Framer Classic held 8% of the advanced prototyping market.

But then Framer pivoted hard toward accessibility for non-coders. Great for business, devastating for the original user base. The “classic” version became a relic, and a whole generation of designer-developers lost one of their sharpest tools.

The irony? Framer’s current success as a website builder proves there was demand for powerful design tools. They just abandoned their power users to chase a broader market.

InVision: The Collaboration King That Got Dethroned

This one hurts the most. InVision was THE collaboration tool for design teams. Seven million users at its peak, valued at $2 billion, and basically invented design collaboration as we know it.

The numbers tell a brutal story. In 2017, InVision dominated prototyping with 60% market share. By 2020? Down to 23% while Figma exploded from 8% to 57%. That’s not gradual decline, that’s industry disruption in real time.

What happened was simple: Figma merged design, prototyping, and collaboration into one platform. InVision suddenly felt like a middleman. Why export from Sketch to prototype in InVision when you could just do everything in Figma?

The company tried pivoting with Freehand (their whiteboarding tool) and InVision Studio (their Figma competitor), but it was too late. They sold Freehand to Miro and shut down everything else by the end of 2024. From a $2 billion valuation to complete shutdown in less than five years.

The Pattern Behind the Graveyard

Here’s what’s fascinating: these tools didn’t die because they sucked. They died because the design ecosystem evolved faster than they could adapt.

Look at today’s market: Figma owns 40.65%, Adobe Creative Suite has 25%, and everything else is fighting for scraps. The market rewards speed, integration, and flexibility. Standalone tools that excel at one thing consistently lose to platforms that can do enough of everything in one place.

But there’s a deeper cultural shift here. Ten years ago, having separate tools for wireframing, design, and prototyping was normal. Today, we expect one product to do it all. Convenience wins, even if we lose some specialization in the process.

The data shows a clear evolution: specialized tools dominated from 1988-2010, acquisition wars raged from 2005-2015, and we’re now in the platform consolidation era (2015-2025). The combined peak user base of these forgotten tools? Over 10.6 million designers. That’s not a small market that’s an entire generation of creative professionals who had to relearn their workflows.

What This Means for Today’s Tools

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: today’s favorite tool could be tomorrow’s nostalgia. The design tools market is projected to hit $18.95 billion by 2030, but that growth is concentrating around fewer, more integrated platforms.

Adobe tried to acquire Figma for $20 billion in 2022 but got blocked by regulators. That tells you everything about market consolidation fears. When one company tries to spend $20 billion to eliminate competition, the market has clearly consolidated too much.

The lesson? Tools don’t just compete on features anymore. They compete on ecosystems. Figma didn’t just build better prototyping, they built a better workflow that eliminated the need for multiple tools.

For designers, this means staying adaptable. The principles of good design outlive any software, but the tools we use to execute those principles are more temporary than we’d like to admit.

The Silver Lining in Software Graveyards

But here’s what gives me hope: good design thinking outlives any platform. I’ve seen small studios like Rock Paper Scissors Studio keep the thoughtful process work alive, where the craft goes beyond the platform and into the experience itself.

Because the best design tool isn’t the one with the most features it’s the one that shapes how you see the problem. And that mindset? That’s timeless.

Even as we mourn these fallen tools, their influence lives on. Fireworks taught us about web-first design. FreeHand showed us what precise vector work looked like. Balsamiq proved that sometimes rough is better. Framer Classic bridged design and development. InVision invented design collaboration.

Their ghosts haunt every modern design tool. Every time you use components in Figma, you’re using FreeHand’s multi-page concepts. Every time you collaborate in real-time, you’re using InVision’s innovation. Every time you prototype with code, you’re channeling Framer Classic’s spirit.

The tools may be gone, but the ideas never die. They just get reborn in shinier, more integrated packages.

And who knows? Maybe in 10 years, someone will write an article about “that time when Figma dominated everything” while using some AI-powered design tool we can’t even imagine yet.

The graveyard keeps growing, but so does the evolution of how we create. That’s the real story here not the death of tools, but the endless cycle of creative destruction that keeps pushing design forward. Now excuse me while I go back up all my Sketch files… just in case.