I've been doing design long enough to see a lot of my tools disappear.

I used to deliver all prototypes and mockups from Sketch (and Photoshop before that) into InVision. They shut down the design collaboration services at the end of 2024, and their Freehand product went to Miro. Adobe XD (which I never really got into that much, as I was a Sketch devotee) has been in maintenance mode since 2023. Avocode shut down. Abstract, which handled version control for design files, is gone. And this month, Motiff and Visily both announced they're winding down on October 31.

This is the nature of software products. It's how this industry works. But every time a tool dies, someone loses an afternoon working out what to move to. So when I built DesignEng Index, I gave it a graveyard: one page per dead or retired tool, with when it happened, a source, and where to go next. Look up InVision and you'll find Figma, Miro, and ProtoPie. Old /tools/ URLs redirect there too, trying to future proof things as much as I can.

Active/Live Tools = More Important

I've worked in branding, marcom, product/UX, and design engineering, and my stack looks different in each one. The questions I actually ask are:

  • Marketing site this week: Framer or Webflow? (or wordpress or custom rails or whatever fed by 20 other tools)
  • Agents writing half my front end: is my design file something they can read? That question is why I wrote Figma vs Paper and the four-way Figma vs Paper vs pen.dev vs Penpot. Paper's canvas is real HTML/CSS, and pen.dev stores designs as JSON files in your repo. Those are two very different bets.
  • And what changed since last time I looked? That's the weekly log. There's so much noise it's hard just to keep up with the releases, especially around something like CONFIG.

Instead of my typical "it depends", I try to be opinionated on why it matters at the end of each one

Keeping Up with the Joneses

Every week, each tool gets checked for new releases and pricing changes, and every change is logged with a link to the source. Those get fed into the newsletter, which recaps the week. I'm bound to miss on something, so let me know and I'll get it fixed.

Check it out at designengindex.com.