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p/lunacy
Graphic design software with built-in assets and AI tools
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Ivan Braun

Lunacy — Cross-platform app, faster than Figma, smarter than Sketch

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Tons of icons, photos, illustrations inside to stay focused. AI-based tools to automate routine tasks. Real-time collaboration to work with the team. Native apps for Windows, macOS&Linux to work fast online and offline, on fancy laptops or potato computers.
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Ivan Braun
Maker
Hey PH community! Welcome new Lunacy, a free cross-platform vector graphics editor and prototyping tool! Designers want to spend more time on design and less on technical and routine tasks. We talked to many designers from all over the world and heard what they said. And created new Lunacy for professionals and rookies who want to: 🔹 work fast regardless of the internet speed on any computer and OS 🔹 collaborate with other users in real-time or keep it private 🔹 keep the design flow intact Lunacy has everything you are used to in other similar apps and goes beyond. Tons of free graphics inside to add them to your designs without googling and stay focused: 🔹 Icons, thousands of consistent and pixel-perfect ones 🔹 Illustrations and elements to add to your designs 🔹 Photos and isolated objects and people to make a photo you need 🔹 UI Kits, the latest ones from Microsoft, Google, and Apple You can add any of it to your designs in a second or use it as placeholders. And you can edit them any time to create custom pictures. Built-in AI-powered tools to automate your routine tasks and save time: 🔹 Background remover. Remove backgrounds in one click. 🔹 Image upscaler. Enlarge images without losing quality. 🔹 Avatar generator. Get diverse yet consistent user avatars for contact lists, testimonial carousels, and things alike. 🔹 Text generator. Forget about lorem ipsum and add meaningful copy to your designs in one click: names, job titles, cities, phone and credit card numbers, and more. You can work online and collaborate with your team in real-time right here, with up to 100 other people. Just share the link to the documents with your team and work together. Or you can switch to local mode whenever you want if you need privacy. Lunacy is not addicted to the internet, and most of its features work offline. Remember when you had slow Wi-Fi or lost internet connection and had to rush to find a better place to finish your work? Now you don't have to worry about it. And if you're a little like me, then you'd love the idea of switching off the internet to finish the work without any distractions. Lunacy works both on fancy laptops and potato computers. In any case, you'll enjoy the speed of a native app that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. The cherry on top is that we translated Lunacy's interface into 21 languages: English, Chinese, Spanish, and others. Many thanks to our great community, who made it possible! 🙏 And all that is 100% free. And that is Lunacy!
ebypotato
@visualpharm I got into UI design because of lunancy. It made the learning process so easy for me and I just adore it but a lot of times the .sketch files created in lunancy tend to scatter and lose shape when opened with a different software but overall I would recommend lunancy to everyone.
Jeremiah Lee
@visualpharm What is your business model?
Alfred Nerstu
@visualpharm @jeremiahlee If you want to use the image upscaler (and probably some other features) you need to pay $29/month (https://icons8.com/pricing)
Luba Zee
Maker
@visualpharm @jeremiahlee Lunacy is free, and we plan to keep it that way. We mostly earn money from selling graphics now: you can subscribe to any of our plans (icons, illustrations, and photos) and use it in Lunacy. We also keep an extensive free tier for graphics both on our website and within any of our tools. For example, we have free icon categories, and UI kits in Lunacy are free, too. Removing backgrounds is free, and I hope we can keep it that way, at least for a while. And we may add extended cloud team plans later for professional users who need a lot of cloud space. The idea behind it is to let people choose and pay for what they need, for the things that save their time, instead of paying for the installed software.
Ivan Braun
Maker
@jeremiahlee Our business model is selling assets. Our software (Lunacy, Pichon, and others https://icons8.com/app ) comes with all our icons/illustrations/photos integrated. You can use low res/bitmap versions for free, but we charge $13-29/mo. for access to high res and vectors. It's no different from IDE tools that are financed by the cloud service providers.
Mustafa S.
Wow, this one has solid rivals as everyone know, which made me more curious, will definitely worth trying. Congrats on the launch and good luck!
Luba Zee
Maker
@milkers Thanks! As for the rivals, we love them. Competition pushes people to make outstanding products 😉
Ivan Braun
Maker
@milkers I agree the rivals are strong. Moreover, it takes years to cross 'the bug valley'. Challenge accepted. Many thanks for the wishes!
Konrad Bujak
Collaboration with 100ppl? What could possibly be the use-case? With figma so well adopted, with desktop apps, why use Lunacy 8? Do you want to take down monopolist?
Luba Zee
Maker
@konrad_bujak Let me be blunt. We want to win our market share, yes. But no, we don't want to take Figma down. We love Figma ourselves; it's a great product that solved the same problems we struggled with back in Sketch's glory days. The collaboration was the problem; handling designs to developers was... hard. Designers worked on Macs, and developers worked on Windows. And that's how it all started: one of our devs made a .sketch files viewer for Windows. Day after day, we worked on Lunacy, and it became a great tool. And we've got a lot of feedback from users who needed something else than Figma. Not because Figma is bad or something, again, it's a great tool. But there are lots of people out there who have computers that can hardly work with Figma files or who need to work offline. And there are professional designers who do a lot of work, and every second counts. They can work fast, and they're in pain each time they have to wait until the file opens or the pictures become visible. TL;DR We're covering the gaps here to help people. If you want to work fast and/or offline or you can't afford a fancy laptop and fast internet, Lunacy is your tool.
Luba Zee
Maker
@konrad_bujak As for the 100 ppl, I can think about a few use-cases. First, teachers at schools, unis, online courses, etc. Many students may need to see the same file and work with it. And user management to meet small limits is not an exciting thing, you know. Second, think of a big team working on a bunch of products. A few years ago, such big teams switched to Figma just because they hated the idea of paying for other software per seat: for all the designers, developers, copyrighters, and managers who contributed to the product or needed access to the design files. And there are some similar teams out there who need the same, but they keep paying for multiple seats of other tools because they can't go with anything browser-based for security reasons.
Bertha Kgokong
I am not a designer but I can tell this is an amazing tool, that will make a difference in the industry and its free ---- just out of this world. congratulations on the launch and well done.
Edgaras
Looks neat, but I don't see how this is better than Figma for actual UI design work. The final goal of design is to help implement, not just to draw. This seems to have much bigger gap from code than Figma.
Luba Zee
Maker
@edgarascom May I suggest you select objects you need and press F4 to call the Code panel? 😉 You'll find CSS, SVG, and XAML for the selected objects there. Check it out, and let me know if you're missing something or have any suggestions on how we can improve it.
Alex Appolonov
Maker
@edgarascom In my mind, it's a point of personal choice. I'm using different devices with Windows, Linux and macOS in my daily work and 4 of 5 are older than 3years and have 16Gb RAM or less. So, my first point will be about the system resources. Figma likes to eat system resources, it's the trait of a used stack. Lunacy is not so greedy about resources. The difference is 30-100% of used memory. The second point will be about working offline. Sometimes an internet connection is very poor or unavailable. The reason for this case has no matter. Figma is not working in this case, but not Lunacy. So, I could work any place I want. The third point is full support of .sketch document type not only import with some limitations.
Edgaras
@tibring I agree about the system resources, Figma performance on very large files quite bad, and it becomes unfortunately very slow to work with large design system. Especially when updates need to be made. I would love to see how Lunacy would handle similar scale systems and component interdependencies. Regarding the offline, it was never a problem for me at least. 99% of times I work online. That 1% of the times, I can still work on the file offline and later on it syncs when I get online. Anyways, my point here is about something else. One of the biggest issues with Figma or any other UI design tool nowadays, there is a gap between design and development. The point of designing UI is always to implement it in code, and the tool should always support that. Framer is a good example of such a software. On the Lunacy landing page I missed the focus on design and development collaboration. Or anything else about how does it support building components and complex design systems. Maybe I am wrong, but this is the first impression I am getting, it's not very UI designer/developer focused. But more for Behance/Dribbble type of designers, with no intention to develop the designs.
Ivan Braun
Maker
@tibring @edgarascom maybe we should give another look at Framer. How would you rate the handoff tools like Avocode and Zepplin?
Edgaras
@visualpharm I haven’t worked properly with Framer. My general feeling is, it’s better for micro interactions and it’s closer to code, but does not have great collaboration and design system managing tools at scale as Figma does. I might be wrong. I remember we had to use Zepplin before when we used Sketch. After switching to Figma, there was no need.
Wilson Ip
?makers I have been eyeing Lunacy for half a year but I am confused about the difference between Lunacy and Mega Creator (both from Icons8). I tried to reach Icons8 support through email, chat, FB and so far I have not receive any response regarding this question at all. Is local app and web app the only difference? Hopefully I reached someone this time! @visualpharm
Luba Zee
Maker
@visualpharm @wilson_ip Mega Creator is an online tool where you can make pictures, e.g., compose a photo, illustration, or make a collage from different graphic elements, including your own. And Lunacy is a more powerful desktop app for UX design. You can create a website design or prototype an app interface and even draw an illustration from scratch there.
Luba Zee
Maker
@visualpharm @wilson_ip And I see that you've got a reply from us on Facebook. Usually, we don't miss messages from our users. So it bugs me to see no evidence of your other attempts in our databases. If you can DM us (on FB) the email you used to contact us before, we'll look into it closely to find out what happened. And don't miss a thing from you in the future.
Markus Novikov
Cross-platform, free and faster that anything else on the market? Is this lun... oh, wai.... I admire your time and effort invested in this product. This is a breakthrough.
Luba Zee
Maker
@markus_novikov Thanks! And more is to come!
Sav Cooper
This is an awesome product. Will cut out the unnecessary work relying on photoshop for tedious tasks- thanks for this!
Alex Appolonov
Maker
@sav_cooper Thank you! That means we're on the right way.
James Turner
I've been using Lunacy for some time - it has been an amazing tool for me designing websites, icons and social images.
Luba Zee
Maker
@turnerj Thank you, James! I hope you'll enjoy the new Lunacy and create more and more great designs!
Julia
Wow! Congratulations on the launch. I am happy that I have Lunacy in my life. 😍 I don't need Sketch with its paid plans and Figma that ruining my computer. 😄
Luba Zee
Maker
@julia_gg Awww! Thanks 💙
Chris Wood
Flipping hell, this can edit and save Sketch files in Linux?! That's incredible! If the interoperability with Sketch works well, then I can legitimately do my full-time UX Design work in Elementary OS (Linux) with this, which is something I'm really really excited about. My mid-2015 Macbook Pro is a wonderful, capable machine, but it's about to become the victim of planned obsolescence. I don't want to buy into that business model, and there's nothing wrong with my Macbook, so Lunacy's Linux support means that I won't have to buy a new Macbook and consume our planet's finite supply of natural resources just to work on Sketch files. With regards to the app itself, my first impressions are wonderful. It looks really fully featured for UI design, the collaboration tools seem well thought-out, and the prototyping tool looks really promising. I loved the tutorial and the interface is absolutely gorgeous. It strikes a lovely balance between familiar and refreshing with how the tools are laid out. I look forward to building my next project on Lunacy and using it to work on clients' Sketch files (without feeling my heart sink whenever I open Sketch). When you build prototyping share links, I hope I can use Lunacy for running usability testing sessions in the future as well. Thank you so much! I'll be spreading the word in my network!
Luba Zee
Maker
@azuredusk10 Thank you for such profound feedback! It's so great to see that you appreciate Lunacy as the software, and to know that it will help you.
Kacim Fedjkhi
@makers Great app with good quelity recources integrated! But, is there a way to re-open lunTempFileSave files? I've accidentally closed a tab with quite some work and found a lunTempFileSave in my trash.
Nick Zaleski
faster than Figma? 😉 that's interesting, I'll take a look. Also, kudos for multilingual support, 20+ languages is impressive!
Vikram Hegde
This is some amazing work. Great work team Lunacy !! And finally Lunacy for Linux, been waiting for a while for that
Luba Zee
Maker
@vikram_hegde Thanks! Just out of curiosity, have you been using Lunacy before? I'd really want to know more about people who would use Lunacy on Linux ☺️
Vikram Hegde
@luba_z Yes, i did use lunacy before on windows, for all the offline work. As for the other question, i don't know anyone else who would want Lunacy on Linux, but if that comes up i'll be sure to let them know about Lunacy : )
Luba Zee
Maker
@vikram_hegde Thank you! Much appreciated 💙
Ye Myat
Nice product! Will try it out. Btw, there's a small typo on the landing page - "Cross-platofrm support"
Luba Zee
Maker
@ye_myat_min Thanks for noticing it! Fixed!
Marius Visan
Hey. Very interesting, definetly gonna try it. Few questions regarding the app: Did you start as a side project or how did you come up with the idea? How many ppl worked on development since when? Thanks,
Samar Jamil
Looks Wonderful, I look forward to the M1 Compatible Version. When ?makers think It will be out?
Alex Appolonov
Maker
@samar_jamil Thank you for this question. I forgot to ask designers to mark it in marketing materials. Lunacy 8.0 is M1 compatible. It was tested on Mac M1 and Intel devices.
Samar Jamil
@tibring Thanks. App works just fine But I see It's showing "Intel" Kind: https://cln.sh/dVFCTl And I faced 1-2 crashes as well: https://cln.sh/oScYk1
Alex Appolonov
Maker
@samar_jamil Lunacy is compatible with M1, the other build type with Apple Silicon mark will come in the closest future. It'll be better to discuss the crashes by Lunacy feedback, email, or Discord. This discussion could contain some sensitive data from your side. You'll be free to post the result of our discussion here or somewhere else, but I'm not interested in sharing any user's data outside the private discussion.
ebypotato
I got into UI design because of lunancy. It made the learning process so easy for me and I just adore it but a lot of times the .sketch files created in lunancy tend to scatter and lose shape when opened with a different software but overall I would recommend lunancy to everyone.
Alex Appolonov
Maker
@ebypotato_graphics Thank you for the feedback! Feel free to contact us if you have an issue or question. We'll glad to help ASAP.
Łukasz
Please, build full support for testing prototypes on mobile browsers. With no UI, locked user-scalable, etc. It's a nightmare with current tools to make remote user interviews on mobile.
Manikanta G
Congrats! I wonder it is free. Do you plan to monetize in future, may be a pro plan?
Sergey Mikolaitis
Maker
@manikanta Thanks! We are selling our Icons8 content in a Lunacy via a subscription, also we will add some cloud team plans in the future.