There’s a narrow window for effective design system work. It sits squarely in the center of a spectrum that’s too easy to slide towards one end or the other.

We chat with Rapha Abreu, VP of design at The Coca-Cola Company and Kristie Malivindi, creative director at John Knowles Ritchie, to learn how they collaborated on a new holiday campaign identity for the world’s most popular beverage.  

Adobe today launched an update to Spectrum, the design system the company has used as the basis for all of its app and web experiences for the last 10 years. Called Spectrum 2 (no surprise there), this new design system backs off a bit from the austerity of the current Spectrum design and adds quite a few more splashes of color  to, as the company says, “make Adobe tool

Hand-curated brand guidelines from around the world

Criticism stings, but would the profession be worse off without it? We canvass opinions from up and down the design industry.  

Generate custom SVG starry skies with ease!

Create images from sketches, icons, photos, or your webcam in real time. Amplify your talent with AI wrapped in this super-easy-to-use tool. Make any idea a reality and have fun while doing it.

Photoshop is probably the best-known and best overall image editing program on the market. But we’ll tell you why Canva is still better.

To keep the list manageable, we’ve limited the list to twelve. Throughout 2023, there were many more great releases, that aren’t on this list, but rest assured, we’ll continue to highlight those in the coming weeks and months.

Design has entered a new era, and so has the Design Tools Survey. We take a first look at how tools are evolving with the use of AI, which we’ll continue to watch year over year. We appreciate our community and their participation this year, as always! The raw data is freely available for download.