Design Thursday #9
A weekly recap of everything you need to know about tools, events, guidelines and design in general.
Shaper
Having difficulties starting your design token system? Shaper is meant to make this easier for you. Adjust some sliders, and it will automatically create type, space, color, greys and radius tokens. You can directly share the documentation and implement the CSS code in your project.
Framer updates
Framer’s April includes a ton of smaller fixes, next to that there is also a new CMS update. You can now add Vimeo videos via the CMS and have site-wide CMS styles for video. This way, you only have to style what your videos will look like once and have it like that across your site.
Sketch updates
Sketch released v96.1 and now includes resolving annotations and smart layout in groups (which is an experimental feature). There are also a ton of smaller updates and fixes in this release.
Color & Contrast
Do you think you know colors? Think again. This guide goes deep into how the eye works, how colors are perceived by different people, and how to choose and use colors. A must-read for every designer.
Advanced Framer
The wonderful Dan Hollick, who is great at explaining complex things in an easy-to-understand way created Advanced Framer. Which is meant to educate you on framer with basic tutorials and an advanced course which is coming soon.
Webflow shortcuts
Webflow has 2 new keyboard shortcuts when copying design from the Figma Plugin to avoid class duplication. This will make your class names a lot cleaner, so a small but important improvement.
Week Planner widget
Make planning a lot easier with this Figma/FigJam widget, Week Planner. Drop it on the canvas and paste anything on top of it to plan projects or upcoming to-dos right in Figma.
Video of the week
We are all very used to product roadmaps, but one important forgotten roadmap is a UX research roadmap where you consistently do research. Learn more about it in NNgroup's video on it.