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Design

7 products in design, ranked by the votes people cast.

LottieFiles

Vector animations that ship as JSON and stay sharp at any size.

DesignFreemium

Figma

Interface design in the browser, with everyone in the file at once.

DesignFreemium

Spline

3D scenes for the web, built in a browser and embedded like an image.

DesignFreemium

Rive

Interactive animations with a state machine, shipped as a real runtime.

DesignFreemium

Canva

Templates for everything, for people who do not design for a living.

DesignFreemium

Penpot

Open-source design and prototyping you can host yourself.

DesignOpen source

Framer

Design a site and publish it, without the handoff in between.

DesignFreemium

Tools for making interfaces, graphics and motion, split between the ones aimed at professionals and the ones aimed at everyone else. Figma is where most product design happens, largely because several people can be in the same file at once and the file lives in a browser. Penpot does the same job as open source you can host yourself, which matters to organisations that cannot put design files on someone else's servers. Framer collapses design and publishing into one step. Canva is for people who do not design for a living and need something acceptable by Thursday. The animation end is its own field: LottieFiles ships vector animation as JSON that stays sharp at any size, Rive adds a state machine so an animation can respond to input, and Spline puts 3D scenes on a page without a WebGL project attached.

Questions about design tools

What is the best design tool for a small team?
Figma for anything that becomes an interface, because the handoff problem disappears when developers can open the file. If nobody on the team designs professionally, Canva gets marketing assets out faster. If files cannot leave your infrastructure, Penpot is the realistic option.
What is a Lottie file?
A vector animation exported as JSON. It stays sharp at any size, is usually far smaller than a video of the same animation, and can be played by a runtime on the web, iOS and Android. It suits interface animation such as loaders and icon transitions rather than anything photographic.
When would I use Rive instead of Lottie?
When the animation needs to react. Rive animations carry a state machine, so hovering, dragging or a change in application state can drive what plays. A Lottie file plays a fixed timeline. If nothing needs to respond to input, the simpler format is the right one.
Can a designer build a real website without a developer?
Increasingly yes, for marketing sites. Framer publishes directly from the design canvas and Webflow produces markup a developer would accept. The limits show up around custom logic, integrations and anything with an unusual data model, which is the point at which a codebase stops being avoidable.

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