The Best AI Coding Tools for Designers

By Dive Club

Categories: Product, Design

Summary

Discover the AI prototyping tools that designers use to quickly build highly interactive UI, from Figma Make to Lottie, saving days of development time. The secret is mastering the 'canvas vs code' mental model.

Key Takeaways

1. Figma Make allows designers to quickly port UI elements into interactive prototypes, cutting development time by up to 1 hour.
2. Lovable is a faster prototyping tool for scenarios without existing UI, enabling designers to create 10-20 prompts in 30 minutes.
3. Combining Lottie animations created in Jitter with Lovable enables designers to rapidly test and iterate on motion designs.
4. Avoid the trap of rebuilding full production components in AI prototyping tools - focus on small, focused experiments instead.
5. Raycast is an essential productivity tool, described as an 'extension of the fingertips' by designers and developers alike.
6. Framer now offers free custom domains for the first year when upgrading to a yearly plan, removing a common portfolio hurdle.

Topics

• Figma Make
• Lovable
• Lottie Animations
• Prototyping Workflows
• Productivity Tools

Transcript Excerpt

One of the biggest parts of my practice as a designer today is knowing which tools to reach for when coding with AI. I've tried a lot of different workflows over the last year and I've come up with a mental model that I find very useful. So I'm going to share it with you today. These are the quadrants that exist inside of my brain. And the x-axis is the size of whatever I'm working on. Is it a quick P3 bug fix or are we going 0ero to one on some really big meaty ambiguous idea? And the yaxis is ...