Agustin Zalazar is a designer and Framer Pro expert based in Melbourne, originally from Argentina. He did not start in design at all. He was a teacher for several years, and stopped because it had stopped fitting.

Argentina, Germany, then a pandemic

He discovered UX and UI design after moving from Argentina to Germany, at a point he describes as being fairly lost. Then he moved to Melbourne, the pandemic arrived, and the free time it created turned into a proper course: UX/UI design at RMIT in 2021, online, a couple of times a week. That is where he learned the design principles, and where he first opened Figma.

Design, annotate, hand off, hope

For the next few years the process ended where his control did. He designed in Figma, wrote annotations, handed off to a developer, and hoped the result resembled the design. Often it did not, which he describes, with restraint, as very frustrating.

What he actually wanted was to write code, so he would not have to rely on anyone else to bring his own work to life. He assumes most designers have felt the same.

2023, and a different idea of what a designer is

In 2023 he started noticing Framer among the designers and creatives around him, and realised how capable it was.

Up until that time, I was like, okay, I am a designer. I’m not a developer. I cannot bring my designs to life.

The tool felt familiar immediately, close enough to Figma that he says he felt like he already knew it on the first day, and the usual months-long climb into a new tool never really happened. Within a couple of months he had gone from rebuilding his own portfolio to building client websites in Framer.

Being one of five

He became a Framer Pro expert quickly. Getting in requires publishing a real client website and earning through the referral programme, and when he joined there were roughly five experts in the whole of Australia.

That scarcity is the business case. People find him through the Framer marketplace, filter by region, and he sits near the top of a very short list.

I get leads every single week. People who discovered me through the Framer marketplace.

Talking clients out of WordPress

He is currently redesigning the site for a large entertainment venue in Brisbane that brings together international street food, bars and live music, and building the whole thing in Framer. He is also building for Apex, a building exterior installation company in Melbourne, who arrived wanting WordPress.

The argument that won was not about the design tool at all. It was about what happens after handover: with the CMS set up properly, they can update their own content without needing him.

What the course gave him

The Ultimate Framer Masterclass covered the span he needed, from setting up a project, colour styles and typography styles, through effects and animations, to handing off a website, managing clients, and building a business out of it.

The detail he singles out is maintenance. Framer ships updates constantly, and the course keeps pace with them, which he points out is not true of most courses about fast-moving tools.

His advice to designers on the fence is that the job description has changed. Pushing pixels on a canvas is a smaller role than it used to be, and shipping the thing you designed is where the value now sits.