Design Tools News #38

Making things for the web got… complicated. The barriers to get something live these days are way higher than a decade ago. The team behind Wunderbucket thought the same, and came up with a tool that functions similar to early Dropbox: select a folder on your computer to sync to the cloud. Wunderbucket then takes care of the rest! It uploads your site to Amazon S3, and your site is live. Update it whenever you want just by tinkering with local HTML + CSS files (etc.). Add a custom domain and you’re done. I’ve been testing the beta, and it works super smooth. They’re close to launching, so sign up to publish your websites in a truly easy way.

Sometimes tools shouldn’t be digital. Analog is a physical companion for your digital tools that helps you prioritize and focus on your most important tasks.

Jeff Sheldon from clothing and accessories brand Ugmonk crafted a workflow for himself to get more productive over the years. With pen and paper, and a system to keep track of the tasks for the day. He now turned that into a sleek physical product with a beautiful wooden stand and a set of cards for different timelines. I prefer to keep things digital, but if you’re looking for an alternative, defenitley check out and back Analog on Kickstarter. The project overshot its goal massively so it’ll get into production soon!

A name that you can pronounce, even while eating. Fun things aside, this is a really cool tool to present content. You can control your slides (or anything really) and have your camera feed + custom background in the same view. Scale your face out of the way, move it to the important part of the screen, or fade it out completely. It has so many smart features to add polish and creativity to every presentation. They also made a really great video demonstrating why you need this.

As a lot of us are working from home more, taking calls, or limited in any other way with for example producing content, this project can be interesting. Good light is important for capturing imagery, and that usually requires big and heavy equipment. BIGSOFTI solves this. It’s a lightweight and compact soft-light with 3 brightness settings and color temperatures that fits any smartphone, tablet, computer, and camera. Want to truly shine on that next Zoom call? Support this project on Kickstarter!

Relate is a visual development environment for fast, live team collaboration. Create components and use them both in your design, and in your live environment. It is a web based tool focused on visual design, but that also generates code in the background. Design & develop at the same time! It’s available now for anyone to try, and they’re aiming for a fully featured tool by the end of the year.

Anima was mind blowing back when it launched for Sketch. Click a button and your website design was live. Their fanbase kept on requesting the tool to work with Figma… and they are now meeting the demand. Check it out and let them know what you think. You can also vote on features and potentially influence what they’ll ship next. So cool!

Sit back, relax, and take 30 minutes to read this wonderful piece on why it’s important to understand and appreciate the history of user interface design. From Xerox Star, early MacOS, Winamp, the iPod Clickwheel, to more recent innovations like the Path app on mobile, the Apple Watch, and Things for Mac!