Design Tools I Want

2020-06-30 • 485 words

Since Sketch, Figma and Framer have come on the scene, design tools have become relatively pleasant to work with. However, Sketch is 10 years old this September and we're still yet to progress past the basic paradigm of drawing boxes on a screen. This blog post is an articulation of what I want to come next.

Rule-Based Design

The first paradigm of improvement is the better implementation of rules that developers an designers already use. Many companies now have design systems, yet design tools often seem painfully unaware of the constraints that their users work with. Why can't I constrain the colours I use in Figma, rather than just picking them? Why am I manually dragging objects around to fit our 8px grid? Of course, code is the ultimate constraint but its API is too wide and not all designers code. Plus, GUIs are often faster to work with, especially in experimentation stages. I'd love to see design tool config for utilising constraint-based design. Think Zeroheight but with your design system affecting Figma's functionality.

AI-Assisted Design

The next step from rule-based design is AI-assisted design. While some elements can easily be codified in rules (spacing, colours, icon choice, typography, and layouts if you are more adventurous), others are still somewhat formulaic yet with a degree of fluidity that makes them harder to deal with through rule-based design. For this category of design tasks, I'd like to systems which aid the designer and automate trial and error tasks. Can we auto-generate desktop designs from mobile ones? Do we need to run A/B experiments or is this the kind of thing that a clever model could help us with (if only partially)? Can we quickly suggest different layout options from the elements we already have on the screen? Another thing I'd like in my design tool is a linter to spot visual errors. Just as eslint warns me when I forget to use a variable, why can't my design tool warn me when something is misaligned? This sounds like an achievable tasks for an image recognition model.

AI-Generated Design

The final step in the design tool hierarchy is complete design generation. At this point, the design tool becomes redundant, instead being replaced by a black box where you pass in a spec and receive a full, responsive mockup. Of course, this goal can be achieved in degrees. Although basic graphic design is a far easier task than constructing responsive mockups, Alibaba is already generating product images with AI. Just as a head architect will design a whole building and then pass the details off to other employees lower down the hierarchy, we can similarly imagine a designer conceiving of a high-level design and then letting a GAN fill in the details.


This is an area I'm actively exploring and I would love to hear from you with any thoughts you have on the topic. Drop me a DM.