In awe of InVision
An aftermath promo for the nerdy designer
Earlier this year, InVision declared that it would officially cease operations by the end of this year. The incoming email (and blog post) didn’t come as a surprise—the beloved pink brand has been slowly dying out over the past few years. Yet for many, this symbolizes the end of an era.
The sunsetting announcement has brought up some public mocking, calling out the fall of InVision. Either triggers a nostalgic emotion or just an evil schadenfreude to harvest engagement in social prisons, the story of InVision does involve common startup patterns. But this story will not live only to that. It does, partly, tell the rise and fall of InVision as a company, yet framing it solely into the startup “failure” narrative is a fatal mistake.
InVision might have financially collapsed and failed to build a product to last, but its contribution to the design community as a whole is invaluable1. From cult culture Clark from InVision emails to educating generations of designers—InVision already holds a place in the design industry's hall of fame, with a lasting legacy.
With pink bittersweetness
Starting in the pre-historic Photoshop days, InVision has been among the original godfathers of the previous design tooling cycle. To an extent, it managed to survive the early rise of Sketch and later Figma’s takeover.
For the very first years, InVision has benefited from being alone in a rapidly growing market. It introduced a new superpower to the designer—the ability to prototype mockups with simple interactions. In a time when Axure and Photoshop Actions were peak technology, the InVision way was exhausting but seemed reasonable. Nowadays, the old experience of exporting images from Photoshop, uploading them to a website, and then manually linking between them to create a prototype feels so antique.
As a last-mile solution, InVision focused on a single aspect of the designer task, filling a gap in the design workflow. The emerging subset of tools with the likes of Zeplin, Origami, Abstract, or Framer (1st gen), have managed to create some great opportunities and at times lucrative businesses.
However, as the UX-UI-Product design discipline evolved, InVision discovered its risky position2. When Sketch came into the arena it integrated its own prototyping solution. Then Figma. The vacuum in which InVision has lived was slowly fading away. New emerging solutions were far better and efficient, making InVision questionable—and over time, irrelevant.
In pursuit of a different focus, InVision painstakingly tried to keep up with the industry and its trends, but without much luck. It built an inspecting tool to compete with Zeplin, a Sketch/XD competitor (Studio), a Design System Manager (DSM), and a whiteboarding tool (Freehand which later was sold to Miro).
In the world of startups, a behemoth often kills a smaller startup by absorbing its product into a larger feature set. But for InVision—that wasn’t the case. In fact, InVision might be considered a behemoth itself. At its peak, InVision generated $100M a year. Under its acquired belt you could find some renowned and nostalgic names like Muzli, Wake, and Macaw. But it seemed like in every strategic decision, InVision was always behind the curve—chasing others while transitioning from building one software solution to another.
In hindsight, competing in the red ocean of design tooling was probably wrong. But as Vinish accurately tweeted a few years ago, InVision might have gone far from tech-design mainstream, but it played a huge part in shaping its culture, long before we started debating whether ‘designers should code’.
Besides trying to navigate as a software company, InVision became a central learning hub. It might have failed to go places in the product world, but it found gold by producing authentic material through its blog and external collaborations3.
In the current sameness landscape where portfolio reviews and Figma tutorials dominate the public discourse, InVision shed light on things that matter—offering a glimpse into the lives of many design teams. With the release of Design Disruptors, it started a streak of making educational resources. It produced more documentaries4, handbooks and even launched an investment fund.
I feel like InVision seeded a necessary plant, but in a backyard garden—almost like a side project. I’m not pretending to foresee what a media future could have looked like for InVision, but it’s clear that such content is missing today.
That’s probably a total non-business perspective, but an untraditionally way to measure a company is by its cultural effect. Having a lucrative and profitable business is one thing, but making a genuine impact is a whole different thing—especially in the abundant sea of software.
When a company exceeds the sum of its parts, it transcends its product boundaries. A successful one establishes or cultivates a subculture (WeWork), creates a micro-economy (Notion), or even a cult (Roam Research).
In the design industry, I genuinely believe we need more communities, not tools. There are so many tools for designers but so few communities. Tools make our job easier. Communities make us better designers. And with the recent AI drama over Figma’s Config, this realization only becomes clearer.
InVision has fostered a strong community, not just around its product but around design as a discipline. Its influence extends beyond just offering tools and will forever be at the heart of many designers.
Maybe InVision could have saved itself by becoming a media company, or an education platform. And maybe not. Anyway, there’s no lesson to be learned here.
Here’s a good recap of the InVision timeline from a former employee's retrospect:
InVision — remember us? Our straightforward prototyping tool, iconic emails from our CEO Clark from InVision, stellar educational content from titans of industry, and lavish Design Leadership Forum gatherings made us the darling of design tools for several years. Supported by an adoring, though somewhat fickle, design community, InVision’s brand (and valuation) rose to great heights, only to tumble as we seemed to make one misstep after another.
To this day, my time at InVision remains the most cherished chapter of my career.
Cindy Wei
Adobe Acquires Figma. InVisioner Reminisces Ruefully.
Other tools like Zeplin and Abstract have gotten into similar difficulties
InVision sponsored designer Dann Petty to produce the Greater Than Avatars series
Transformation by Design, Squads, The Loop—did I miss something?