What tools do designers use?
Earlier this week, I made a series of extensive jokes on Twitter about ketchup as a design tool. Yes, ketchup as in the condiment.
The original joke was a play off of a post where the author spoke about Webflow as the ultimate web design tool, or as they put it “reality.”
My response was a similar remark, except I noted ketchup as the ultimate web design tool.
This was followed by a highly ridiculous demo of “ketchup.”
The joke was intended to be satirical, admittedly, a play on the endless rhetoric of the UX vs. UI ketchup bottle meme.
The original author of the tweet likely had valid reasons for posting what they said, based on their experience. I suspect they find Webflow to be an effective tool to design with and it works for their process. While I made a joke about it, I honestly think this is far from the worst designer take I’ve ever seen.
They didn’t say something we need to be upset about, but a little razzing can be fun.
That said definitive statements in a field with so much ambiguity can present problems, particularly with less experienced designers.
The truth is that Figma and Webflow are both effective tools for designers, depending on what you are looking to do. Anything can be a design tool, even Photoshop, even PowerPoint, even paper and pencil… even ketchup.
The reason I made this joke touches on an important part of my experience as a designer. After nearly ten years in professional design roles, I firmly believe that designs are not defined by tools, they’re defined by solving problems for users. How you design your solution all depends on context.
So naturally, I have to follow up on these jokes with a lengthy post about design and the tools designers use.
I’ve loved design since quite early on in my life, though I didn’t entirely understand what “design” was for a long time.
The first time I remember designing anything was a birthday party invitation I made for my ninth or maybe tenth birthday. I used Microsoft Word.
I remember sprawling out the invitation title using rainbow gradient WordArt and stealing an image of Yoshi from Google to add in. I consulted with my mom to ensure I had the right date, address, and details. The moment I printed out those invitations, I felt so proud.
At that time, I barely knew how to ride a bike, let alone the definition of an effective design tool. Yet, there I was, releasing an effective design.
In the mid-2000s, you could find a teenage Anna making awful designs and art on a pirated version of Photoshop (that a friend gave me, I promise). Usually, I was making work that I would share in online forums, or with friends.
I would hand-code my posts with inline styles so that they would look as emo as possible. I’d make drawings, posters, and invitations for friends, put together complex layouts for my classwork, and develop designs for my school paper in InDesign.
I had no idea that I was designing or when I was designing. I just created work that made sense for the context.
Late nights spent on my computer blogging inevitably turned into me taking a graphic design course in high school and beginning to put the word “design” into the context of what I was doing.
Inevitably, the word “designer” stuck with me, even with my developing understanding of the word’s meaning, and I entered college. I focused the majority of my efforts on learning about digital design.
But as I pursued an education in design, I became obsessed with the tools used by “good” designers. Suddenly, my years of practice felt utterly worthless, obscured by a pile of the next and greatest tools.
I remember that my program had just stopped teaching Flash a semester before I took my web design course. I heard design leaders continually talk about the “best” tools, but all of the tools were different. All I could do was try to keep up.
The consequence of that is that I did not come to understand design thinking until far later.
In many cases, I focused more on answering questions like:
- What is the best new design tool?
- What color combinations create the most aesthetically pleasing look and feel?
- What new typefaces are the coolest?
- How do I create a gradient background on this website?
When I should have been asking:
- What is a problem I want to solve?
- Who are the people that have this problem?
- How can I meet their needs to solve this problem?
- Then what tools can help me test my ideas, iterate on them, and deliver effective solutions?
When I finished my undergraduate program, I recall being highly versed in a lot of tools, and underprepared to actually work through problems. I finally had the title of “designer,” yet I constantly felt like an imposter.
Today, I look at fresh designers who experience the same feelings.
I don’t think my education was bad, I had great teachers and a solid program. Rather, I think all design education in UX, UI, and interaction design spaces can be prone to emphasizing tools over users.
When we do that, we can’t look at problems and needs critically to actually solve them in sustainable, inclusive, or scalable ways. This approach creates self-doubt among many designers that last for years, if not forever.
In these cases, we might start to wonder “am I actually a designer?”
“Designing interactive systems demands collaboration between designers of many different disciplines.”
Over time, I’ve come to re-embrace my humble beginnings as a designer.
Though I am a huge fan of Figma for interactive design, I’m still a fan of Photoshop too. If ketchup were an effective tool in the right context, I’d be a fan of that too.
I see the term “designer” as a moving target. It’s why I sometimes use the word “designer” to broadly apply to not only people with the title of “designer” but also developers, engineers, product owners, etc.
Many different people are designers, even if they don’t have that exact job title. While each designer role has different names and responsibilities, a designer is anyone informing decisions in design and architecting a user’s experience regardless of medium or tools.
In What do Prototypes Prototype? Stephanie Houde and Charles Hill (both of whom worked at Apple at that time) speak to the intersectionality of our roles, regardless of our official titles. When discussing different prototyping methods and the purpose of each method, Houde and Hill also expose the interconnected nature of each contribution to design. They define a designer as “anyone who creates a prototype in order to design, regardless of job title.”
Their model of design describes each designer role as a combination of three elements:
- Role: Defines the function that a design serves in a user’s life and how it is useful to them. In digital products, we tend to find people with the titles of “product owners and managers” serving this part of design.
- Implementation: Defines techniques and components through which a design performs its function, as in the “nuts and bolts” of how it works. In digital products, we tend to find people with the titles of “developers” and “engineers” serving this part of design.
- Look and Feel: Defines the concrete sensory experience of using a design, what a user looks at, feels, and hears when interacting with it. In digital products, we tend to find people with the title of “designer” serving this part of design.
Though the exact role and responsibilities according to title, organization, and medium can vary, the integration of each of these considerations comes together to create a complete and comprehensive design.
Each type of designer in this definition of design uses very different tools. Product leadership may lean heavily on Jira or Asana, designers may lean on Figma or Webflow or Sketch, developers may use React and Vue.
I think we can all understand that a dependency on certain tools can mean we miss important parts of designing for our users.
For example, a dependency on any design tool that doesn’t allow us to understand programmatic output might mean our designers focus heavily on visual design alone. If the tool made us reliant on visuals alone, and we weren’t willing to adapt, how would we design experiences for screen reader users who use markup to interpret what is presented on a page?
A willingness to adapt might mean we interpret our ideas into different formats, using any tools necessary, to test their effectiveness.
Honestly, you could design using anything, even ketchup. As long as the design is effective who cares.
At the end of the day, there are always going to be debates about effective design tools, what it means to design, how we design, and the like. Everyone has their preferred tools, and yes, some tools are better in certain contexts than others.
In another 10 years, we may find that the tools we use to deliver digital products look entirely different. I hope they do because there are so many opportunities for us to do more and do better.
The beauty of the work we do as designers is solving real problems, communicating our ideas, scaling our efforts, and empowering our users. We do this work to impact the world around us, not to say we know how to use a tool.
So keep in touch with your humble beginnings and design with ketchup (as necessary).