Design Thursday #56
A weekly recap of everything you need to know about tools, events, guidelines and design in general.
Webflow AI Site Builder
Webflow launched their AI Site builder that helps you get to a first version of your website faster. To use it you just have to share dome details about the project or your company and Webflow will create a website based on that. You can customize the theme, layout, fonts, buttons and more. Of course afterwards you can edit the website fully to your liking. You probably won't have a production ready website yet, but this is way faster than starting from scratch or by just using a generic template.
Penpot 2.5
A new version of Penpot is now available and includes several updates like a new gradient UI with support for multi-stop, mention people in comments, copy & paste shape styles and sharing links to specific boards.
Framer
The team at Framer has been busy this past week. They released a bunch of new features, including:
- CMS performance updates
- Offscreen animations, this lets you pause animations if they are no longer visible, this will make your site faster and improve your INP (Interaction to Next Pain) score, a Core Web Vital metric.
- The localization view has been update to make it easier to navigate and manage. This way you can translate an entire CMS collection at once.
- Plugins 3.0, which can now access all collections. This allows you for example to create a blog post or items in the CMS via Plugins.
Rive negative corner radii and early access
Rive added a new option to create a negative corner radius, this can be helpful to create some more complex shapes without having to create custom vectors. On top of that they also released new Early Access apps that will unreleased features, a first one Data Binding, which lets you make your animations even more powerful with real data.
Keep in mind, these early access features might not work in production products!
LottieFiles plugin for Figma Slides
LottieFiles has updated their Figma plugin to now also support Slides. This allows you to include animations in your presentations to add some extra flair. You can either import an animation as SVG or GIF.
Read about LottieFiles for Figma Slides
Play Sneak Peak: Desktop Simulator
Previously, you could only preview your prototypes on the mobile app, but in an upcoming update Play will include a desktop simulator that let's you continue to work on your desktop. But don't forget to test on real devices too!
