Design Weekly #26

Weekly design news and inspiration

Published in

Design Corner

5 min readJul 15, 2018

Welcome to Design Weekly 26, a quick rundown of the most interesting products, articles and other cool design-related things from throughout the week 😀.

Design News

Figma 101

Designlab have a new email course for learning how to use Figma. The 7 day course takes between 20–30 minutes a day and covers the basics of the design tool. Each day you’ll work towards creating a prototype mobile app.

Figma has been gaining a lot of traction over the last year or so thanks to its real-time working environment for teams and the fact it has a free tier. With it being web based it’s really easy for designers (and engineers) to collaborate together regardless of what OS they’re running. There’s never been a better time to give it a try.

Affinity Designer for iPad

Affinty finally released an iPad version of their popular graphic design software. Like Photo for iOS, Designer manages to seamlessly recreate all the features from its elder desktop based sibling in an impressive mobile app optimised for touch.

This the first vector design app for the iPad and could be the small beginnings of an iPad only workflow for creative pros, although at the moment that’s a bit of a stretch for covering all disciplines, it would probably be doable for illustrators. If you do happen to use an iPad for all your work needs we’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

Macbook Pro 2018

Apple quietly updated the 13 inch and 15 inch Macbook Pro lines with more powerful components while leaving the design unchanged for the most part, the 3rd-gen keyboard has reportedly been improved to be more quiet and harder to break. The power boost is most noticable in the top specced models of each size, the max spec 13 has a quad core 8th-gen intel i5 processor, it’s bigger brother or sister opts for an i7 running on six cores.

This should provide a sizeable performance upgrade over last year’s model. Apple claim up to a 2x boost in speed, although we’d take that figure with a pinch of salt. Pricing remains almost exactly the same as last year.

Framer X

Framer have teased a new tool their calling “game-changing”. X will blend design and development seamlessly together for the first time according to the announcement. Not much else is known about the product except it will be based on React and will launch this fall.

Surface Go

Microsoft’s latest 2 in 1 looks like a decent piece of mid-range kit. Spec-wise the more expensive option (£510) comes with 8GB of RAM, 128GB SSD and an Intel Pentium Gold 4415Y processor. Frankly we don’t know much about the Gold chipset but it would be reasonable to expect performance to be on par with the Core m3 from the 2016 Macbook.

As is typical of Surface devices, the keyboard has to be purchased separately. Even with that in mind, the GO seems like quite good value for money for most consumers who like using Windows. Should be a decent bet as a student machine or as a secondary work unit for tasks like typing on the train, illustrating at a cafe, presenting work to a client etc. Pushing the hardware to its absolute limit, it may just be able to suffice as a primary machine for designers on a budget, at the moment it’s uncertain how performance across the Adobe suite or comparable software will be.

The device launches in August and for now you can check out this pretty sweet promo video.