The Next Generation of Creative Tools
Over the past few years we’ve seen an incredible rise in the number and adoption of new creative tools. Designers today have the knowledge, technical ability, and desire to build the very tools we use daily to design. These tools are not only improving our ability to design but also allowing us to dream up solutions never before possible.
One area designers and engineers are focusing on is application prototyping. For many years we’ve been using tools built for photo editing or presentations to do mobile application design. In essence, we’ve been slicing tomatoes with a spatula. Fortunately, many designers are providing us with the newly sharpened knives we’ve been dreaming of as more products are written from the ground up for prototyping.
Framer – Prototyping as Design
One such product that we’ve particularly loved for a while is Framer. Started by Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk, two founders that live and breath creative tools, Framer’s life began as an open-source javascript library to help designers build and test complex interactions. Though Adobe had a whole suite of products, none effectively addressed this growing fundamental need for designers to prototype designs for applications.
A community of designers, including lead designers at Facebook, Dropbox, and Apple, quickly formed around Framer and began supporting its development. The energy from these early users inspired Jorn and Koen to focus on Framer full time and build Framer Studio – a prototyping app for Mac based on Framer.js.
Today, Framer boasts a thriving community of over 5,000 designers sharing best practices, a rich gallery of examples to help you get started, and a faster, more feature-rich application.
Framer + Designer Fund
We’re very excited to announce our investment in Framer. While we’ve come a long way in the past few years, there is still so much to be done to make these tools more accessible, to bridge the divide between prototype and end product, and to effectively collaborate between team members. We know Jorn and Koen are committed to bringing their vision of Framer to reality and we are all excited by the journey ahead. Ultimately, we hope this inspires more designers to support the evolution of creative tools and moves us all towards better designed products and services for people everywhere.
Framer Resources
- Framer Studio
- Framer Examples
- Framer Discussion Community
- Give your Framer prototypes a better memory
- Using Parse to power up your Framer prototypes