The year 2016 saw some major updates in the design tools and their features. Popular design tools like Adobe Photoshop and Sketch have been ceaselessly employed in the visual design applications. These tools can be used to carry out some design tweaks involved in web development.
However, with the ever-evolving technology, we come across so many tools every now and then. While not all of these tools are fully usable, but some of these can be very useful in easing our web and graphic design tasks.
Let’s take a look at 5 visual design tools that you must put your hands on in the year 2017.
Adobe XD
Adobe has been focusing on designing prototyping tools since years. We came across such a tool back in 2012 when Adobe released Adobe Edge, but it was discontinued in 2015.
However, Adobe had a come back with Adobe XD in 2016. It is a vector drawing app that lets you easy prototyping by creating click-through prototypes with so many artboards.
Some of its users believed that XD is very much like Sketch, but we can expect a lot of new features to be added into XD in upcoming days. A major advantage to Adobe XD is that unlike Sketch, which can only be used in iOS app, XD is also available for Windows users.
Figma
Figma is a vector-based drawing software which has recently evolved. The highlighting feature of Figma is its real-time collaborative feature on the top of core design toolset. Similar to how programmers add their own code to a project in real time, Figma can be used by multiple designers to work together even when they are located on remote sites. How interesting would it be to work collaboratively on one project through this common platform?
Zeplin
Zeplin is a popular name when we talk about a Sketch plugin. It allows developers to easily verify the UI Specs of different layers in the Artboard. In addition, users can also comment on any Artboard as needed and download any necessary asset for development through Zeplin.
The major advantage of Zeplin is that designers need not individually draw the UI Specs, and developers do not have to manually request specs or assets.
Protopie
ProtoPie is a great tool to create micro interaction prototypes without requiring any code. Most of the tools require designers to have a sound knowledge of coding and then design from the programming perspective.
Prototypes created using ProtoPie not only show the visual preview of a prototype on the mobile screen but also allow physical testing using multi-finger gesture, sensor usage, and device-to-device communication.
Important Read: How can Micro-Interaction be used to Boost Mobile UX Design?
Framer
While most of the design tools that gets rid of coding hassles, Framer makes use of coding for prototyping of design. Among all the prototyping tools discussed above, Framer has a lot of room for code learners.
In the previous version, designers had to code manually, but the newly released version in summer of 2016 incorporated auto-Code to minimize the manual coding efforts.
