When I started learning web design, I opened Photoshop because it was the only design software I had ever heard of. That was my first mistake. I spent 3 months creating mockups in a tool built for photo editing, wondering why exporting assets felt like solving a puzzle with missing pieces.
What went wrong with that choice
Photoshop has no concept of components. Every button I designed existed as a flat layer group, so when a client asked me to change the primary color from blue to green, I manually updated 34 separate elements across 6 artboards. That single revision took 4 hours. A junior designer watching over my shoulder asked why I was not using Figma, and I had never heard the name before that moment.
Switching tools mid-project
I moved to Figma on a Tuesday afternoon. By Thursday I had rebuilt the same 6 screens using shared color styles and a component library. The color change that took 4 hours in Photoshop took about 8 seconds in Figma. I am not saying Figma is perfect for every task, but for UI design specifically, it handles the repetitive structural work that Photoshop simply was not built to do.
The lesson here is not that Photoshop is bad. It is that every tool has a primary use case, and web UI design is not Photoshop's. Spending 20 minutes reading about what a tool was designed for before committing to it would have saved me an entire quarter of frustration.