Digital Designer from Scotland. Interested in user centered design, productivity & self development. Fan of all things Arrowverse and usually seen with a book.

Mar 25

Design Weekly #18

Featuring Gravit Designer 3.3, Webflow Ecommerce and MentorOla

Welcome to Design Weekly 18, a quick rundown of the most interesting design news, articles and other cool things from throughout the week.

Tip: Our favourite articles are always at the the bottom, you’ll find inspirational Behance projects and art styles from the latest game releases too 😀.

Design News

Gravit Designer 3.3

Gravit Designer is a completely free, often overlooked design tool. The latest update adds improved vector point snapping, EPS import, switch to Beta mode in settings, unified resizing of borders, corners and clipped shapes and improvements to line endings.

There’s also a portugese version with other languages coming soon alongside faster load times, general performance improvements and a host of bug fixes.

We’ve found Gravit to be a suprisingly capable tool from illustration to UI design and presentations. The best part besides it being free is it’s availability across Windows, Mac, linux and Chrome OS. Gravit is currently missing the 3rd party support of its paid software counterparts but offers a native experience that’s almost as good and a convienence that’s currently unrivaled.

Creating a document on the office PC and then opening the file through the Gravit cloud and editing it on a Mac at home on the same tool is a fantastic experience. No matter what computer you have to hand you’ll be able to work with Gravit Designer.

Gravit owner Christian Kramer has said we can expect plugins in the pipeline plus apps for iOS and Android alongside a pro version offering enhanced features.

Well worth downloading and having a play around, especially recommend it to those wanting to learn vector illustration.

IPhone SE 2 Leak

Mac Otakara posted a video of a device claiming to be the iPhone SE 2. It might not be real but there is a possibilty we could see this design launch later this year.

The iPhone SE is Apple’s cheapest phone at the moment and also it’s smallest. The design and size is very similar to the iPhone 5S while the iternals are near identical to the 6S.

If the SE2 in the leak is indeed real, it will have a much larger screen than the original SE, it’s hard to tell from the video but it looks to be 5 inches or more.

The design language is quite similar to the X and has adopted the same notch on top, specs wise we’d expect it to be close to but not quite as powerful as the iPhone 8.

The dual cameras on the back suggest it could well be more powerful than the 8, this would leave question marks on why anyone would buy that phone if the SE 2 will indeed be Apple’s most affordable handset.

Speaking of which, the bezel-free display and dual cameras suggest it won’t be cheap at all.

The leak could be a fake Chinese device or it could be a different Apple phone altogether but if that’s not the case, this could be a great successor to Apple’s best small phone, albeit a slightly puzzling one in terms of where it fits within Apple’s marketing strategy.

Webflow Ecommerce

Webflow, the tool for creating bespoke websites without code is adding a new platform that focuses on e-commerce. Soon you’ll be able to build stunning shopping sites without typing a line of code.

Webflow Ecommerce will feature custom product grids, product pages, animations, shopping cart, checkout pages and everything else you’d need like inventory and order management.

It looks like Webflow are targeting entrenpenuers with this, most likely entrenpenuers who are designers as Webflow requires a lot more design knowledge than Wix or SquareSpace.

Not much is clear yet on pricing or when it will launch. You can however sign up for the Beta now.

InVision Deck

Deck is a free card- based UI kit for Sketch and Photoshop. It comes with a generous 200+ UI elements, 45 UI templates and 14 symbols.

Lunacy 3.0

Lunacy allows Windows users to view and edit Sketch files. It does an admirable job, working really smooth and tackles the frustrating problem of working with Sketch files as a Windows user. “Mac and Windows designers can be friends again”.

You can open and save Sketch files, organize pages and artboards, draw join and align shapes, use typography tool and export assests.

It’s not widely advertised but Gravit Designer (mentioned earlier) can open and edit Sketch files on any platform as well as export them. XD recently added support for Sketch files too.

For many Lunacy will be quicker and easier though as it’s interface and feature set mimic Sketch. A really cool app from the icons8 team who have already planned a bunch of great new features for the next update.