Design Tools I’m Ignorant About

These are all tools with creative and strategic potential which I’ve been tinkering around with over the summer.

Tableau helps you see patterns in your data by using it to create visualizations. It turns spreadsheets and live data sets into insight. Apple Global Marcom uses it. But the learning curve looks daunting.

Framer creates interactive mockups for digital products. You can import sketch layers, animate them with code then test the results on your mobile device. I’m not sure how to make a game for my kids with it yet.

Shopify is a beautiful platform for online-stores. Can I monetize my intellectual property with it? Theoretically, yes. But the path to doing that raises new questions of inventory risk, marketing, shipping, product design and cost benefit analysis.

Contentful and Siteleaf are technically solid Content Management Systems. But to unlock their full potential it looks like you need to be a skilled developer. Some of the usable languages (of which I am not proficient) Node.Js, Ruby on Rails, Swift, Sass.

Ouroboros an impressive preset for After Effects built using expressions. The tutorials I’ve seen make it look easy, until you try to actually do anything with the tool. It’s unbelievably confusing.

Adobe Experience Design is a beautiful tool for wire-framing websites. Khoi Vinh really is making adobe awesome. It has some prototyping capabilities as well which I haven’t explored. I don’t do enough web work to justify using it, but it’s beautifully made.

Great patience is often required to learn things worth learning. I’ll probably add to this list as I discover new tools and make stuff worth sharing with these. Learning is a life long journey.