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Design things I do every day now that I didn’t do a year ago
I was looking back at the past year and it occurred to me that it was a year of big changes for me in the things that I did on a daily basis. I did larger things like change jobs and reconfigured my home office so that it was more “permanent”, but I also changed the things that I do at a much granular level. It reminded me that, as a designer and as a person, that I am capable of learning and change.
Update 1/10/2022: The second edition of “Design Things I do every day that I didn’t do a year ago” is available here.
Use Figma as my primary design tool
Over the past few years, I have heard multiple stories of how great Figma is, enough that I believed that Figma was an unattainable thing for me to learn. I felt for a while that I was at the mercy of Sketch and InVision, as that was the required software at my previous job.
Then all of a sudden, poof, new job and here was Figma standing in front of me to learn quickly. I appreciate doing design and prototyping using just one tool, that alone has saved me a lot of time. The more I learned Figma, the more I liked about it, from the auto layouts (admittedly, hard for me to pick up after being a Sketch head) to having design systems front and center.
Coming from Illustrator and Sketch land, I also like that Figma has its keyboard shortcuts mostly compatible with those programs, such as r for rectangle and l for line. I also appreciate their YouTube channel as well as all of the templates in their community. I especially appreciate all of the different design systems that are available, including:
- Material Design
- Goldman Sachs — a design system made for financial companies
- Atlassian — admit it, you have had to do mocks for Confluence too
- Uber
- and many more
That said, I do wish that it was more compatible with the online collaboration tools that have now become critical for designers who work with clients.
