Welcome to the Studio Platform!
“If you like to draw, do not automate drawing: rather, program your computer to give you a new set of paints. If you like to play music, do not build a ‘player piano’: instead program yourself a new kind of instrument.”*
— Alan Kay
Hello, friend! 👋
Welcome to the Studio Platform Blog. We’re here to discover what building screen design looks like together, with you.
We’re currently working on an open development platform for InVision Studio, where all users (including us) build Apps and features with the same API.° Leveling the playing field entirely has been a core tenet of Studio since its inception. Our aim is to give away something that’s useful for everyone who’s developing design tools — no matter if it’s there to support an initiative on your company’s roadmap, or it’s your vehicle to discover what you can make with it for fun!
In harmony with the ‘everyone is first class’ charter of our Platform, our blog is here to be a springboard for knowledge sharing and telling the designer/developer’s story.
In short — this is a place for the Design-driven Developer to be recognized and heard.†
What you can look forward to
We’re bringing you on board the amazing journey of developing the Studio Platform! 🚀
We’re keen to share some of the relevant engineering patterns and processes we’ve gathered while building a world-class Design tool. What’s happening ‘on the ground’ in our Platform isn’t something to just keep to ourselves!
We’re also excited to give updates from across the design-development community and explore the collective ‘north stars’ of UX we all have in common. Let’s shine a light on the many incredible teams working diligently to reinvent UX Design! 🔦
We’re all in it for Design˚
We’d love to see the Studio Platform become your ‘npm of screen design.’ You don’t necessarily need to think about it (or us) while you’re using it — it should serve as a gateway to new levels of creative design magic that allows you to grab, publish, and freely share whatever ‘set of paints’ you need for amazing experience curation.
This blog is curated by the developer advocates of the Studio Platform, and we’re devoted to making your experience useful and worthwhile. It’s our mission to listen to the needs and interests of you and your team — and do everything we can to enable them to make (and enhance) great things.
We won’t be posting marketing messages for Studio here. We hope that by the authenticity of what we care about, and our associated interest in your success as a builder of Design-tooling — the content we share will delight you and inspire you to stick around for the long term.
Topics
As an entity, our Platform is a virtual ecosystem that represents an organic network of creative developers. We’re really eager to empower the awesome people of our network by covering the following topics:
Accessing the Studio Platform
Beyond creating and provisioning great tools, our next top priority is making sure it’s incredibly easy for you to access everything you need. As such, a Developer Portal is on its way! Quickstart guides, how-to walkthroughs for basic workflows, answers to FAQs — all of these resources and more will be coupled with a forthcoming Studio Platform API release. Also, stay tuned for useful API and developer-tool announcements and updates.
Looking under the Hood
Sometimes the best way to understand what you’re using is to take a look at what makes it run. We think it’s important to bring you relevant insights into Studio’s ever-evolving core architecture. It’s part of our commitment to openness, and we think it’ll help you build great things well! In fact, the next post you can look forward to reading here will be “Crafting the Studio User Experience (Part 1)”. In it, we’ll explore some of Studio’s architecture and the milestone decisions that got us to where we are.
Being the Ecosystem
This is about you. We want to tell the story of your amazing projects and celebrate your efforts. We’ll strive to help spread the word when your new tools become available to the Design community — whether through Studio’s App Store or the open source grapevine.
Supporting Community
Let’s share conversations, thoughts, and tackle issues that the Design-driven Development community cares about. We want to go beyond the product space and discuss what defining and building screen design looks like across the board with everyone who’s supporting its future.
Fostering Innovation
We’ll be showcasing advancements and breakthroughs from the teams working to make this all happen: the Studio Platform team, our Partner community (that’s you!), and InVision Labs (our Apps R&D center). Highlights from ‘small ships’ to freighters are ahead.
Goals
We feel it’s worth our time and yours to share some of our roadmap insights and reveal what you can expect from us as we iterate on Studio and our Community efforts.
Transparency
We’ll strive to provide considerate answers to any questions (be they simple or complex) about us and what’s going on with our Platform and Ecosystem. We’re here for you. Thanks for caring enough to ask!
Gathering and Publishing Feedback
In order to make sure we’re sharing the topics that matter to you most, we’ll be publishing user-surveys and polls for pertinent feedback — about both the Platform and this blog. Let us know what you think!
Join us!
By now we hope you feel empowered to reach out and build amazing things with us. Here’s a few ways we can collaborate right now:
- Join our Maker Program! (Need a boost to get development going? Also apply to our Design Forward Fund!)
- Invite us to do a workshop for your team or local community! Please leave a comment on this post and we can sync up with you directly.
- Just want to chat about rad design tools? Us too! Join our Studio Community Facebook group and reach out!
- Do you have topical suggestions for us to write about? Are you interested in writing a guest blog about your hyper-useful or imaginative App and/or project? Feel free to comment and start collaborating with us — this is your blog too! 🙌
We’re continually available to make the Platform better for everyone — and we hope you get inspired here as you see into the challenges we face, and surmount them along with us as co-members of the Design-Development community. 🌍🌎🌏
Try out Studio!
We’d be remiss if we didn’t give you the chance to download and try out InVision Studio — version 1.0 just landed! 🎉
Please check out the release notes and see what we’ve been busy cranking on for you. ⚙️
* From “Microelectronics and the Personal Computer” (1977) by Alan C. Kay
° The Platform will be open, but is currently being developed and tested internally. ‘App’ is our moniker for ‘plugin’.
† A person, group, org, or team who’s interested in the evolution of screen design, and how human/computer interfaces enrich our lives.
˚ The universal thing that is Design that we’re all here for. The discipline that informs our design-thinking, and the field we work in and develop.
👉 Amazing illustrations by Tania Yakunova.
