Design Tools News #29

If you ever made flows, you know it can be time-consuming to draw and maintain all those arrows. Luckily, there’s the new version 3 of Flowkit that has all the arrows you can imagine, in a beautiful and structured package for any of the 3 major drawing tools. Best of all, it comes with a Figma plugin now too!

This plugin allows you to get rid of placeholders or pseudo localization. Use it to export your designs in any language right from Sketch. If your product is spanning multiple locales, you know the struggle, and this might just be something you desperately need!

Not a design tool, but a nice utility that can boost your productivity quite a bit. Mouseless is a beautiful way to get better at all the creative tools you know and love. It includes Sketch, Figma, Adobe XD, Slack, VS Code, Trello, Notion, and more!

This got me very excited back at WWDC 2018. Retouching photos with the Pencil, or just being able to open and inspect a .psd file on your iPad sounded like a superpower. And now it’s finally here! It’s an interesting piece of work, and I’m happy it’s out. Just a little sad with its current limitations, like not being able to open a RAW photo… Anyway, I’ll give it some more time.

Looks like Framer is back! I again get excited for a new release by this team. For me personally, Framer X didn’t cut it. If I need to prototype a fairly complex interaction or animation, I’d still rather use Classic.

But adding live collaboration, and accessing the tool from everyone through a browser, might just be the ingredients that take away the issue of getting stuck. Sharing it with others who can help out could accelerate learning too! Sign up for the beta now. It ships in 2020.

During the last Adobe MAX there were some big announcements for XD, including live collaboration! The feature is now in beta. Generally it’s really great to see more tools moving towards these capabilities. Besides that, it has versioning now, and enables designing component states. These are the signs that competition pays off for us as as the audience community.