Cody Keisler While creativity is a huge part of design, being able to keep up with the work we do and make collaborating as smooth as possible is half the battle. A good tool combined with a good process can help keep everyone on the team sane when you’re in the middle of a project and things are at their most chaotic.
With that in mind, here are some of the tools we have used and hope to use more this year to take designs from napkin sketches to production and work together seamlessly (mostly) while we do it.
Figjam
Purpose: Digital whiteboard
Pricing: Free, $5/user/month
When it comes to visualizing ideas in an expressive way, Figjam is hard to beat. It’s become our team’s go-to tool when we want to get a concept in our heads down on digital paper and share how we’re thinking about a problem with each other.
The team behind Figjam has created a space that makes collaboration easy and approachable. As a team of designers, we appreciate how much time and attention has clearly gone into the UI and UX to make it feel both professional and whimsical.
From the sticky notes to the built-in music to the extensive library of stickers, Figjam feels like an inviting place to collaborate with your peers.
It also doesn’t hurt that it’s inside our most used design tool, Figma.
Linear
Purpose: Project management
Pricing: Free, $8/user/month, $14/user/month
Project management is a space rife with tools asking for your attention. And our team has tried a number of those solutions in an attempt to wrangle our to-dos, but one has stood out in the crowd.
Linear started as a simple issue tracker that hoped to use simplicity to slay the Goliath that is Jira. But over the past five years, it’s become a full-fledged competitor that is often the default choice among startups.
While we’re just getting off the ground as a Linear team, we’ve already started to see the benefits of its opinionated approach to project management. As we get further down the road, we hope to use features like Roadmaps, Cycles, and Project Updates to help focus our work and keep us all aligned on our overall team goals.
Stark
Purpose: Accessibility testing
Pricing: Free, $180/year, $198/user/year
Even though some question the importance of striving to be accessible, our team has never doubted whether or not building for all of our users was paramount, and tools like Stark are the only way to make that possible at scale for a team of our size.
The Figma plugin has been especially helpful, enabling us to check contrast and type size on the fly to ensure we’re meeting our own standards. Our goal is to dive even deeper into Stark and utilize their dev annotations and reports to ensure everything we build is accessible from start to finish.
One aspect of Stark that we’re excited to try out is Sidekick, their AI companion that helps identify a wide range of accessibility problems right within Figma. It should be beneficial as we audit our design system, enabling us to have a consistent foundation without our designers needing to double-check every design they work on.
Spline
Purpose: 3D design
Pricing: Free, $9/month, $12/editor/month
One of the areas that our team is most interested in exploring more this year is 3D design. With our brand involving so much 3D imagery, not to mention motion, we’ve been looking for a tool that can handle both with an intuitive interface.
Spline has surfaced as a solution that is almost ready-made for our problem. There’s no question that other apps, like Blender, have much more mature toolsets, but Spline’s web-native nature and multiplayer collaboration make it a no-brainer for a distributed team like ours.
Additionally, the UI is very familiar to anyone who’s used design tools before, mimicking interfaces like those from Adobe or Figma. It does a great job of making a very intimidating subject more approachable for someone just starting out.
The team behind Spline is also pushing into new areas, releasing features centered around Apple’s visionOS right after launch. It shows a desire to improve and stay at the bleeding edge that our entire team appreciates.
Figma Dev Mode
Purpose: Design handoff
Pricing: $25/user/month
One of the tools we’re most excited to expand our use of this year is actually a mode within a tool. Dev Mode was introduced in Figma last year at Config, and it’s been a game changer from the start.
Having a dedicated interface for our dev team members built into the tool we use the most for designing (and managing our design system) has smoothed out many rough edges in the handoff process. Annotations, in particular, are well-loved by our entire team. Taking what was a manual process and making it dynamic and 10x faster has made Dev Mode an easy sell to designers and devs alike.
With the creation of our Storybook (which we’ll talk about in a minute), we’re excited to see how Dev Mode plugins blur the lines between our team’s two halves even further, not to mention the Jira plugin, which has special functionality when in Dev Mode. Fingers crossed that Figma announces even more features at this year’s Config.
Eraser
Purpose: Documentation and diagrams
Pricing: Free, $10/user/month
Docs are one of the most essential pieces of any team, and ours is no different. We have a lot of solutions that get used internally, from Google Docs to Notion and beyond, but the one thing that makes Eraser stand apart is its built-in diagram functionality.
Honestly, even calling it “built-in” is a bit of an understatement since diagrams are on equal footing with docs inside Eraser. But the ability to write your docs and create your diagrams all in the same place and combine them seamlessly has already convinced members of our team that Eraser should be our go-to for documentation.
One prominent feature that I’m personally excited to use more is their AI diagrams-as-code. In Eraser, you can describe the diagram you want in a prompt, and the AI will build it for you with an easy-to-learn coding language that you can edit for fine-tuning afterward. It’s really wild to see it at work as you learn how to craft the right prompt, and it builds exactly what you were picturing right in front of your eyes.
Storybook
Purpose: UI sandbox
Pricing: Free
Putting Storybook on this list is about as obvious as putting Figma here, but our team is so hyped about finally getting one of our own that I couldn’t not add it.
Storybook is the answer for teams that want to have a single source of truth for their UI in a digital product, and even adding an out-of-the-box, vanilla one will level up any system. But the real unlock is when you add plugins, of which there are many, and customize your Storybook to fit your needs.
Our team is particularly excited about viewing dark and light themes, interactivity, and all the different variations of our components in one place and production-ready code. That, combined with the potential to sync design tokens with Figma, will give us the single source of truth for our system that we’ve only been able to dream about thus far (or at least that’s the goal).
That’s a wrap
Those are the tools we’re most excited about exploring this year. Not everyone will make it to the end of the year, but that’s okay because exploring new solutions to problems is half the fun.
While all of these tools are great, what’s most important is finding what works for your team. A tool is really only as good as the team that uses it, so don’t get bogged down in picking the “right” one.
As long as it works for you and your process, you can take what’s in your head and make it a reality, which is all that matters.