✍️ Mapping Designer Tools

Designers and developers are willing to collaborate but are facing key challenges:

• Their tools are not connected (Figma for designers | Microsoft Visual Studio and Github for developers)


• They don’t speak the same language


• Design tools produce images that developers have to translate into code


• It’s impossible to preserve a brand identity across all its

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In the design industry, I genuinely believe we need more communities, not tools. There are so many tools for designers but so few communities. Tools make our job easier. Communities make us better designers. And with the recent AI drama over Figma’s Config, this realization only becomes clearer.

InVision has fostered a strong community, not just aro... See more

The core insight of Figma is that design is larger than just designers. Design is all of the conversations between designers and PMs about what to build. It is the mocks and prototypes and the feedback on them. It is the handoff of specs and assets to engineers and how easy it is for them to implement them. Building for this entire process doesn’t ... See more

Designing in an AI World

AI will reduce today’s design jobs. This I feel strongly.

The value of many design jobs today is in visual translation. Someone has a picture in mind of what they want and hires a designer to make that picture real.

If that person can instead feed in a text file into an AI tool and say:  Show me a bunch of webpage option

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The first piece of the puzzle is democratizing creation itself. The best tools broaden the scope of who can be a creator: Figma and Canva for design; Kapwing and Veed for video; Descript and Splice for audio; Unity and Unreal Engine for gaming. Elegant, design-first tools unlock new levels of self-expression. They make being a creator more accessib... See more

To avoid feature bloat and ruining the core experience, is your organization capable of sorting through a flood of design ideas and synthesizing and evaluating them holistically? Do you have the development talent and leadership to implement a good design that includes evaluating visual design, usability, and design strategy from an objective and l... See more