Design Tools News #40

Muse is a super cool and flexible tool to spatially organize sketches, photos, bookmarks, maps, notes, basically anything. Dive into and out of spaces to create a visual mind map of whatever idea or research you’re working on. A bit of a steep price, but if this way clicks with you, it could be well worth it. Check out this thread by one of the designers explaining some of the decisions that went into making this tool feel so smooth and intuitive.

One of the highly anticipated features by Sketch just launched: Assistants. Install them like a plugin, and they can help you working faster by assisting in spotting a range of things. Stay consistent with design systems, prepare your files for collaboration, and follow your team’s rules. They have set up a very neat page with an overview of some existing assistants for you to install, but it’s also fairly straightforward to make your own!

The Figma Community is now getting rolled out to everyone! It’s a space where you can publish Figma files for anyone to inspect, reuse, and remix. You’ll also find plugins here. A nice space for everything related to your design workflow, and with nice folks sharing their powerful files.

If you’re not testing with high-fidelity prototypes, are you really getting the most valuable feedback? By using realistic prototypes that are tailored to the testing experience, participants are more likely to behave naturally — as if they were interacting with the real product. Framer now integrates with Lookback and UserTesting enabling you to level up them prototypes!

AI Image Enhancer is a free online image enhancer tool that uses AI technology to enhance photo color and improve photo quality. It’s stellar, and might be just what you need for a quick touch up!

Another privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative. Plausible Analytics is a simple, open source and lightweight website analytics tool. They state that your website data is 100% yours and the privacy of your visitors is respected. That means: no cookies involved 🍪! I mentioned other tools before, so be sure to compare it to Fathom or Simple Analytics (my personal favorite)!

Make sure visitors actually like your website before asking for their email address. It’s a popup that’s actually polite! It’s free and open source, and you can figure out how it works by experiencing it yourself on this demo page. In short: it waits for the right time to ask for emails.

This juuuust launched: Lacona 2 for Mac. And as you know me a bit, this is dear to my heart. Lacona is a new Alfred or Spotlight like tool to search your entire system, but not only search. The power of Lacona is to trigger commands. Think of scheduling events, calculate and convert, edit contacts, etc. So: Don’t just search. Command.

Matt D. Smith, an industry veteran, launched a new design course that teaches the intricate skills of designing visually beautiful interfaces, while balancing functionality and accessibility. Whether this is something for you or not, it’s definitely worth scrolling through the page with all its beautifully designed micro-interactions!

Last month Medium announced more customizability, frictionless reading, and a better space for short(er)-form content. And last week, they announced a new mobile app. And most importantly, they’ve made changes to how the paywall works. From now on it’s possible to decide your articles should not be put behind the paywall. It is free to publish on Medium, your content is always yours, and it will be hosted for free, indefinitely. Is Medium back on track to become the right platform to publish articles again!? Let me know what you think of these changes!