is a blog about design, technology and culture written by Khoi Vinh, and has been more or less continuously published since December 2000 in New York City. Khoi is currently Principal Designer at Adobe. Previously, Khoi was co-founder and CEO of Mixel (acquired in 2013), Design Director of The New York Times Online, and co-founder of the design studio Behavior, LLC. He is the author of “How They Got There: Interviews with Digital Designers About Their Careers”and “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design,” and was named one of Fast Company’s “fifty most influential designers in America.” Khoi lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
A quiet week or so in design tools news, but still plenty to note, including the beta of a new UI design app for iPad. See, that’s how far this market has come—we’re so spoiled by new contenders in this space that we find it unremarkable that “only one” new app was announced!
ProtoSketch is a new vector graphics application for iPad (an OS X version is also in the works). It classifies itself among full-fledged drawing apps like Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw, claims to be suitable for web and app design, icon design, print design and vector illustrations, but specializes in user interface and user experience design. You can see a working prototype in action in the video below. If the team can pull this off on an iPad, I’ll be very impressed; creativity software on tablets and phones is of particular interest to me. The app is currently in private beta; I haven’t been able to get my hands on it yet. protosketch.co.
Amber Bravo of Google Design moderated a fascinating roundtable with Matias Duarte, Paul Colton (Pixate) and Max Wiesel (Relative Wave, makers of Form) on “How a new generation of prototyping tools at Google will help designers build better software.” Bravo has also posted this appendix of sorts to the conversation. The big takeaway here is that Google is gearing up to make a splash in the design tools space.
Prototyp is a browser-based app that lets you create interactive prototypes quickly. It’s built on Framer.js, so knowledge of JavaScript or CoffeeScript is required. prototyp.in.
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