Design Thursday #75
A weekly recap of everything you need to know about tools, events, guidelines and design in general.
Paper now in public alpha
Paper was invite-only up until this week, but now open for everyone to try the public alpha. It's very similar to Figma, but brings AI image editing front and center and includes shaders, making your design come to life more than ever before. This is something no other UI design tool has offered up until now. In an interview with Dive Club, co-founder Stephen Haney shared more about Paper a few months ago. They explore why there is a need for a new design tool, instead of straight-to-code AI tools.
Stark for mobile apps
Stark is now able to test the accessibility of mobile apps on both iOS and Android. On top of that, you can also structure your projects in folders, a small but helpful update. Plus, there are some other improvements:
- Annotations will automatically move to the right spot when you open the Stark plugin in Figma if you move any frames.
- Alternative text suggestions will now be more descriptive.
- You can delay URL scans to avoid issues scanning because of security configurations.
Components in Rive
Nested artboards were previously a good way to simulate components and reuse animation in multiple other artboards. But they now got a big upgrade as actual components. Similar to other design tools, mark an artboard as a component and you can use re-use it anywhere in your file. They will soon come together in libraries, which is currently available in Early Access.
Read more about Rive Components
Framer updates
Framer shipped a few updates this week:
- You can now multi-select pages and assets to quickly move, duplicate, or delete multiple pages, components, styles, or vector sets at once.
- The Usage Monitoring dashboard will give you insights into how much bandwidth your site is using, so you can optimize assets before running into limits, and it will make your website faster.
- There was also an under-the-hood update, where they switched to Rolldown for bundling. This should load your pages faster (especially on mobile), and it should take less time to publish an update.
Framer's Making room for big ideas
Framer will host its next event on October 16 to share its next big feature updates.
More info about Framer's event
Webflow Conf
Another event reminder: Webflow Conf is happening next week, September 17-18. You can still sign up to attend online to get a look at the future of Webflow and talks from over 70 speakers.
