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What's your design tool of choice?
Interested to hear what design tool(s) you're using to make your products, at Product Hunt we use Sketch and I personally love it.
But what are you using and what do you love about it? Or do you want to move away into something new?
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I use a combination of Figma + Interplay, Webflow, Framer X, Principle, and used to love using Atomic. Atomic unfortunately shut down, and now I'm on the hunt for a tool as good them that will be useful in every situation like Atomic was.
We've been using Sketch for ages. In fact, we love it so much we use it for Presentations, in place of Adobe Illustrator in some cases, and beyond its original use for UI/UX!. Though - we've been considering, or at least exploring Figma 2.0 . Have you ever considered the switch? Seems like a close call on the poll above.
A lot has changed since 2017 but when I joined a company I'm working at right now, these were the reasons for switching from Sketch to Figma:
"When I joined AJ&Smart in July, the guys were using Sketch for prototyping. I’m not going to describe how good the tool is because it’s widely known among many design teams in the world but what was missing for us was the possibility collaborate in real time.
Since we work using design sprints only, we prototype at a very high pace during one day in a week. And with Sketch we were just sending the same Sketch file one to another to compile the prototype out of different screens different designers were making.
To align better and improve the speed of prototyping, I suggested we switch to Figma. Because of a few reasons:
1. Real time collaboration directly in the browser.
2. Graphic interface is very similar to Sketch, so no need to learn a completely new tool.
3. Team library: each week we use the same UI elements across different projects (like headers, buttons, dropdowns, etc.), so we built a library of components that we can easily reuse when creating a new prototype (with being able to change fonts, shapes, etc.)
4. Browser based tool: now, when someone who uses Windows or any other OS other than Mac OS, can easily work in Figma using browser or its desktop app. So, when we send the files to clients, it’s just links which they can instantly open, without having to install any additional tools.
5. Prototyping feature: after creating separate screens in the same file, you can connect them into a prototype. The only thing is that it doesn’t have built in interactions yet (like native iOS animations, e.g. swipe back, slide up, etc.). However, most of the times we use Marvel App for creating the prototype itself out of screens we designed in Figma because Marvel app has the interactions mentioned above, device previews, possibility to embed videos or include links to websites.
6. Inspect feature: developers for web, iOS and Android can inspect the design files to find all the margins, styles and even snippets of code for css, objective-c, etc."
I've used Axure RP at my last two companies, and it's really pretty good for advanced prototyping. I like how it uses native form elements so users can actually type data in, make selections, etc., which makes usability testing feel much more real.
We use Webflow CMS to deisgn anything linked to the web, and I like to add some interactive things like Naker.Back :)
I've found Invision Studio to be the best balance between design, prototyping and feedback management. Webflow is a close 2nd.
For me the choice of the tool depend of challenge for example:
If you are part of a large team building a huge product and you need to have great collaboration between designers, Figma it's a great choice.
If you need to prototype and design (saving time) in a single app to test and validate ideas with a small and large amount of user combine Studio + Webflow is really powerful.
If the company started creating digital product and own the adobe account XD is in the package (Ready to use)
And finally if all de design system of a big product was created in Sketch, and the team has created a ecosystem of work, collaboration, process and tools, I don't see the necesity to change.
Resumen: Depend of the challenge.
The best design tool for me and for a lot of other people i have worked with is Figma, a cloud-based design tool that is similar to Sketch in functionality and features, but with big differences that make Figma better for team collaboration.Figma works on any operating system that runs a web browser. Macs, Windows PCs, Linux machines, and even Chromebooks can be used with Figma. It is the only design tool of its type that does this, and in shops that use hardware running different operating systems, everyone can still share, open, and edit Figma files.Because Figma is browser-based, teams can collaborate as they would in Google Docs. People viewing and editing a file are shown in the top of the app as circular avatars. Each person also has a named cursor, so tracking who is doing what is easy. Clicking on someone else’s avatar zooms to what they are viewing at that time.
Now I'm using Sketch for design and Figma/invision for prototyping . Thinking of using Eva Design system :)
![Anatolii [ @Bootstraptor ]](https://ph-avatars.imgix.net/428688/0c610880-d857-4865-b071-bb51a31e1741.png?auto=compress&codec=mozjpeg&cs=strip&auto=format&w=48&h=48&fit=crop&frame=1)
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