Add the annotations feature to design mode

Hi @Adam_James2, Thanks for sharing your thoughts on annotation! I can see how accessing annotate from Design Mode might be beneficial for your use case.

We use voting to understand what our community is most interested in, which helps us prioritize our actions. So, we’re really looking forward to seeing how the rest of the community responds to your idea.

Your contribution to our community is greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

As a designer, I would find it super logical that annotations would also be in designer mode. I even think it is necessary that annotations are also visible in viewer mode. You also want to use annotations to explain functionalities. This can be to other stakeholders such as developers. The result is that if this is not the case, we as designers also have to create and maintain the designs with our own components that we use as annotations. That is inconvenient.

As a team, we have the following components to explain designs to customers, managers, developers and other colleagues.

+1!!! I think of behaviors/requirements as I am designing, and find it frustrating that I have to switch to Dev Mode → add an annotation → switch back to design mode every time i want to add an annotation. It also annoys me that I have to switch to dev mode to read my annotations. I want to be able to add annotations while i am designing.

Hey Figma friends! I just wanted to share the idea of having the annotation feature into the design mode as well. This features works very well in collaboration with the devs, but when we need to share design to POs or BAs or anyone that doesn’t have a dev mode seat can be a bit of a bummer. Think about it!

Please add annotiations in Design Mode too. It is more than necessary.

It’s a huge mental effort and a waste of time that as a designer I have to switch between DesignMode and DevMode in order to add the annotations. And I cannot add all the annotation at once, I cannot keep in mind all I want to say. So, I add them as I need to comment on something. Makes no sense to switch between modes.

+1 to this. I need to make notes on all my comps so I can keep my thoughts straight while designing, and communicate certain functionality to our product team as we work through behavior. Generally speaking these are NOT handoff notes for devs (we usually add those later in the process). Currently I have to rely on a clunky system of annotation components that I’ve created, but i’m unable to connect them to actual design components in any way, so if the layout changes I need to rearrange all my annotations too.

Yep this is a +1 for me! Everybody should be able to see the annotations, only designers / dev’s should be able to add/change.

Yes please add annotations to Design mode. We have stakeholders (other than dev) that also need annotations. They are also of great use when one design “takes over” working in another designer’s file. Our design team has been using a plugin called “Anno-tation” that is a great tool, but is a bit slow to add to the canvas. It would be amazing if something like this was native to Figma.

• Annotating designs in prototype view

Hello, everyone, I made a plugin to add annotation in figma, 

design mode, dev mode, prototype mode, all of them can see annotation

+1, it’s annoying to switch everytime, plus it’s a bit slow

comments and annotations have different uses

The annotations are often vastly superior way to leave comments to the design compared to the comments feature, which tend to get in the way, are easily displaced/unlinked from the Frame they were supposed to annotate etc. The problem here is that if you want to use it to leave comments that all stakeholders can see, not just devs, it would require the very expensive Dev mode seat. Surely you can justify the Dev mode with other features besides this very basic upgrade to the existing, flawed comments feature?

I just got a popup in Figma saying that annotations can be used been in design mode as well. I guess this is being rolled out in parallel with the updated plans.

This is still not useful for me in a big design team (and i would warrant most users). 
Most of my devs and stakeholders are on a free seat, because they only need to view designs, and they can’t even see what any annotation says.

Having this available to editors is actually a problem, because as an admin, I can’t just disable this functionality. I have to manually tell people not to use it, and hope everyone complies, before we get an avalanche of people complaining for not being able to read annotations.
 

Rafael_Milcic1 wrote:

I just got a popup in Figma saying that annotations can be used been in design mode as well. I guess this is being rolled out in parallel with the updated plans.

This is still not useful for me in a big design team (and i would warrant most users). 
Most of my devs and stakeholders are on a free seat, because they only need to view designs, and they can’t even see what any annotation says.

Having this available to editors is actually a problem, because as an admin, I can’t just disable this functionality. I have to manually tell people not to use it, and hope everyone complies, before we get an avalanche of people complaining for not being able to read annotations.
 

Same for me! Really annoying, I want to share my annotations with stakeholders who really need figma just to see the design. We need to have this annotations available also for viewers if is related to design.