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A Transformative Month for Designers

Over the last two weeks, we put on Designer News meetups in 10 different cities in North America and Europe. I spoke with nearly every attendee, and came away impressed with the general optimism. Right now is an amazing time to be a designer. The month of October is going to make it even more exciting.

When Macromedia sold to Adobe in 2005, it created a vacuum in the design industry. Adobe and Macromedia fostered healthy competition where the winner was the designer. In most of the years since the acquisition, the demands for design tools have changed significantly. Adobe has been the primary player for a long time and, up until recently, was the only company that could offer tools powerful enough to build complex, pixel-perfect applications.

Given the surge in seed capital, the introduction of crowd-funding platforms, software library maturity, and a greater appreciation of design jump-started by iOS, the industry is changing quickly. Rather than having two large companies going head-to-head, we’re seeing a lot of small competitors develop specialized applications. In the past two years alone, the following tools have been created and are seeing some success:

  • Sketch
  • UXPin
  • FramerJS
  • Pixate
  • Flinto
  • Marvel
  • RelativeWave’s Form
  • Affinity Designer
  • …and many others

Before these new tools, old ones were shoehorned into new purposes. Illustrator is used to design websites, Photoshop is used to design apps, InDesign is used to lay out flows, and After Effects and Keynote are used to prototype animations. Adobe’s suite is so powerful that it was able to fill the void as this new economy sprang up. But now that market is demanding more specialized tools, and Adobe is beginning to adapt.

We’ve arrived at a point where new tools that are tailored to the new app industry. (Think about that: designers were living without applications that are meant for designing apps for years until Sketch came along.) Adobe is being put once again into a position where it must compete, and designers are demanding more specialized applications. We maintain an internal zeitgeist of what programs are popular among LayerVault customers, and the popularity of these specialized apps is growing quickly.

Signs point to this being a big year for Adobe at their annual conference, Adobe Max. Serif, unknown to many until recently, will be releasing its Affinity Designer tool on October 2. Bohemian Coding continues their quick clip and are reaching new levels of maturity.

All of this energy is converging into the month of October. This October will likely be the most important month in design industry in recent years. Over at LayerVault, we also have a few things up our sleeves.

Get excited, and get ready.

–Kelly

As always, you can discuss this post on Designer News.

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