Design Thursday #51
A weekly recap of everything you need to know about tools, events, guidelines and design in general.
Spline Spell
Spline released a very cool AI model that generates a video from an image, which is turned into a 3D space. So image to video to 3D model 🪄. It’s generated as a Gaussian Splatting 3D volume that can be interacted with and is embeddable on a website or app.
Variable Modes in Webflow
Variable Modes let you create different variables (design tokens) for example for desktop and mobile breakpoints or for light, dark or subbrand themes.
Read more about Variable Modes
Midjourney Profiles, Moodboards & Patchwork
Personalization profiles allow you to build a custom model based on your input. Using moodboards you can personalize it even further by uploading inages. This way you can build your own model for the specific styles of images you upload.
Patchwork is a reasearch preview which can be used as a collaborative, AI-supported canvas to create fictional worlds. By dropping images and text on the canvas in a collage format, you can start to generate a world.
Framer updates
- Analytics has been redesigned and introduces lots of new features like live visitors, bounce rates, UTM filters to track campaigns, country, browser, …
- The Assets Panel also got a redesign with new features, including folders, nesting, update badges, sorting and much more. This will make it easier to manage styles, components and code.
- Open Type support for Google fonts
- More CMS Sorting options are now available on the canvas and they can be combined to be more advanced.
ProtoPie 9.0
The latest version of ProtoPie does now support Auto Layout when importing from Figma, making it easier to build responsive prototypes. Also check out their year in review, to get a recap of what they’ve been doing in 2024.
Rive updates
- N-slicing, like the good old Android days, rive now supports N-slicing for more control over how images stretch.
- Scrolling: ever wanted to create an even more interactive Rive animation? Well now you can, scrolling a list or a map or even build animated sliders.
- Auto Bezier: the graph editor can now automatically generate a bezier curve for your keyframes that updates based on the values and keyframe timing, making it easier to build fluid animations.
New in Play
- Audio support for prototypes to build experiences using existing audio files or recording them right in your prototype
- Arrays can now be created and used to keep track of simple data in your prototype to make it more realistic.
- Custom Haptics allow you to create your own haptic “sound” from a json file instead of using Apple’s built-in haptics.
- Rive Events can now be used to take more control of your animations.
Penpot 2.4
- This new release includes an upgraded file history which keeps track of manual and automatic versions which is no longer removed when closing your browser.
- A new viewer role is added for team members who shouldn’t edit your file but just see what you’ve been working on.
- The .penpot file structure is updated to be more efficient and easier to use.
LottieFiles updates
- LottieFiles for After Effects v4 is now available and has support for single matte layers, expressions, time remap, bluk rendering, matte masks and gradients. Also a beta option to import your Lottie file back into After Effects to edit it further, great if you lost uour source file.
- AI theme generator in Lottie Creator allows you to automatically create a color theme for your animation.
- SVG to Lottie, you can now upload a SVG file and animate it with presets or customise it to your liking.