Tools to keep an eye on!

Read time: 3 mins

I’m going to be honest, with a lot of tools coming out right now, there aren’t really a lot that we should be paying attention to. Don’t worry about it, if something worth our while comes up, I will let you know.

Do you know you can now sell 💵 designs on Figma community.

Things we’ll be cover:

• ✅ Tools you must have

• 👀 Tools to keep an eye on

• 🙌 Figma resources to checkout

• ⚡️ Exciting tools to checkout

✅ Tools you must have

Figma - For UX, UI and Web+Mobile Design
As many of your know, I teach Figma, and I think it’s currently the best UX, UI and Design tool out there, and I don’t see an immediate competitor right now.

Webflow - For website/landing page creation
I have worked on Wordpress, Shopify, and a few other platforms as well, and based on the growth of Webflow, and the jobs in the open market, I would highly suggest designers to familiarise themselves with it.

Eagle - Organize all your reference images in one place
When starting out on a project, download this tool on a free trial and give it a try if you have to collect a bunch of inspirations and generate a moodboard. You’ll be surprised how much of an aid this tool is!

1password - One of the more secure password managers
This is more for professionals and teams. I used to use Lastpass but there was a breach, so I could no longer trust it.

Todoist - Manage your personal tasks
If you want to manage your personal tasks with ease, and keep track of them. Try to read about the The Eisenhower Matrix to optimize your daily tasks a bit better. (feel free to use any other todo tool).

👀 Tools to keep an eye on and start exploring

Framer - No Code Design tool
This is a tool that’s perhaps going to be more powerful than Figma, and a bit less powerful than Webflow. But even if it better than Figma, or Webflow, it does what both of those tools don’t allow you to do right now. Design with ease, and publish what you’ve designed.

Lunacy - Potential Figma Competitor
With a lot of basic functionality like live collaboration, autolayout, AI generation tools, tons of visual/3d assets, and smart detection features (like color and z-index) stuff. This can be something impressive!

Spline - 3d tool for Web Experiences
I have been playing with this tool, and now with them introducing AI as well, I think this a great tool to bring much needed interactivity and flare to your web experiences.

Quote of the week

🙌 Figma resources to check out

Design systems in Figma
A combination of a huge list of professional and enterprise grade + open source design systems for Figma. Use any of them to get started on your own design system for a client instead of building things completely from scratch!

Material Symbols plugin
A much powerful way to use Material Design icons.

Illustrations Plugin
Allows you to freely fetch illustrations from a few popular illustration libraries out there.

Most powerful content generation Figma Plugin (perhaps)

Kernel - Content generation

⚡️ Exciting tools to checkout

Runwayml - Tons of AI tools all into one allowing you to generate/modify videos and images

Adobe Firefly - Logo + Image generation with a much simplified interface

Visily.ai - Really powerful wireframe generation tool, allowing you to create designs from just sketches

Thanks for reading! Ideally I’ve provided you value in this newsletter. If I have, feel free to share it with a friend. You can find me here.

Until next time!
Asaad