October 1, 2018
Newsletter

Let’s Talk About:

There Will Never Be Just One Design Tool

Our colleague Katherine recently wrote a great article that asked us to remember that design is messy, and our tools should enable exploration, not just production:

“The designers’ job is to create definition where none existed before and feel comfortable playing with pieces that are still ambiguous, that are still liable to change. I want my design tools to accommodate that process. As a designer, I want and need a tool that balances that messy process with efficiency.”

From Invision to Paper to Spreadsheets, at Viget, we’ve seemingly used every tool available to design and prototype our work. We are constantly challenged to make new ideas real and as we do, we've found there isn’t any single tool that does everything we need.

As an industry, we can, and should, continue to evolve our tools. While we wait for that perfect tool to be created, it's comforting to know there are really great ones that exist at almost every level of fidelity and complexity.

Read Katherine's Article


Community Thoughts on There Will Never Be Just One Design Tool...

  1. 1. Sketching Lo-Fi with Whimsical Whimsical is our new favorite tool for sketching out ideas quickly and at low fidelity. Sometimes a full-featured design tool just gets in the way when you need to explore an idea.
  2. 2. Collaborating with Figma We love Figma’s approach to collaboration, and are excited by the recent improvements to its prototyping features. Figma helps us both with high fidelity design and putting together interactive prototypes for clients and testing.
  3. 3. Prototyping with Principle Sometimes we need something more powerful than Figma to prototype a new idea, and then we usually reach for Principle.
  4. 4. Interactions with Framer Like Principle, Framer lets us try out more complex interactions, flows, and animations than Figma. We’re excited that Framer X is making that power more accessible.
  5. 5. Prototyping with Keynote It’s not a regular part of our toolbox, but Keynote deserves a shout out for being FREE for MacOS and a surprisingly able prototyping tool.

We believe the best work happens when talented people trust each other enough to be real and take risks — and we’re looking to grow our team!

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