InVision

2011 - 2024

dead

invision was the design tool that a lot of software teams ran their prototypes through in the middle 2010s. you uploaded screens, wired them together into something clickable, and shared a link so people could comment right on the mockup. at its peak it was valued near two billion dollars and sat at the center of how digital products got designed. then Figma arrived with real-time editing in the browser and took the whole category, and invision spent its last years shrinking until it turned everything off at the end of 2024.

» see invisionapp.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

invision's peak years line up almost exactly with my own work in software, but i sat on the wrong side of it. i am an engineer, not a designer. invision was the tool the design people on the other end of a project lived inside, the place the mockups came from before they landed on my screen as something to build. i clicked plenty of invision links. i never made one.

the company started in new york in 2011, built by Clark Valberg and Ben Nadel out of an earlier consulting shop. the idea was small at first: take flat design files and make them clickable, so a prototype could feel like a real app before a single line of code existed. it caught the exact moment when everything was moving to the screen, and it grew fast, raising over 350 million dollars and reaching something like seven million users.

for a while invision genuinely owned this space. a 2017 survey put it at roughly a third of the whole design-tool market, ahead of everyone. it had the prototyping and the developer handoff, and it kept adding more on top.

~ the dossier ~

Born	2011, New York
Peak	about $1.9 billion valuation, roughly 7 million users
Killed	31 December 2024, all services shut off
Lifespan	about thirteen years
Made by	Clark Valberg and Ben Nadel
Killed by	Figma

~ the actual end ~

the thing that killed it was Figma. Figma ran the whole design process live in a browser tab, many people editing the same file at once, and it made invision's upload-and-sync loop feel slow and dated almost overnight. Adobe tried to buy Figma for twenty billion dollars, which tells you where the value had moved. invision fell behind and could not climb back. in early 2024 the new management announced the end, and every service went dark at 11:59pm on 31 december 2024, with the stored prototypes deleted soon after.

~ the next chapter ~

there is a specific sadness to a design tool deleting its own contents. all the mockups and the comment threads where teams argued over a button, gone on a scheduled date. invision had raised a fortune and been called a challenger to Adobe, and it still ended as a cautionary line about owning a market right up until someone rebuilds it better. the work it pioneered did not die. it just belongs to Figma now.

~ leave a rose ~

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~ leave a wreath ~

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~ leave a note ~

visitors before you have left these graveside notes. anonymous welcome.

other software: Microsoft Delve, Norton Ghost, Paperback Software, Adobe Fuse

also died in the 2020s: Google Street View (app), 壁紙.com (Kabegami.com), 123 Importados

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