Introducing InVision Studio (invisionapp.com)
6 years ago from Stephen Olmstead, Design Partnerships @ InVision App
6 years ago from Stephen Olmstead, Design Partnerships @ InVision App
For a second, I was hoping that they solve the one HUGE problem that all of these tools have:
They are based on artboards. We use these tools to create hundreds of artboards (=images) for apps and digital products that have as little as 3 different views.
We create still images for what is a living product. It's like drawing a storyboard for a movie. While this is a necessary step, we also need to tackle the next step which is making the f… movie. We can connect the single images with fancy animations, but they are still (still…) images. Then we let someone else make the movie and wonder why it didn't come out as we planned.
What we need is a tool that creates living components. Just let me create components and let them have multiple states based on click-, hover- and scoll-events. Then, let me build a view consisting of those components.
Kind of like Framer, but way simpler. Designers should code, but won't.
While I applaud the effort that went into this product (and it is for sure very well designed) I think it's just a prettier, maybe more practical version of the tools that already exist.
Are we all supposed to switch from Sketch now, just to run into the same problems we already have?
I absolutely agree with this. Spot on.
I think that in order for the industry to make a seismic shift to other tools, like the great migration from Photoshop to Sketch, we need a design tool that fundamentally rethinks how we design, and until that happens, everything will be an alsoran of Sketch.
That, or there needs to be a fundamental design problem that Sketch doesn't solve that's really important in order to force migration, like how Retina devices forced people off of Photoshop and into vector based programs.
I always kind of chuckle when I see UI gifs and heavily animated prototypes. I'm sitting here thinking - good luck finding a dev who can do that, and good luck making that turnkey enough that it'll be approved in a real-world business setting. There's a reason nearly all of your apps don't look like any of these prototypes you see nowadays.
Lottie is a great tool and I'm starting to see it peppered in here and there, but mostly in loaders and onboarding views. I did notice this tool has a panel for exporting swift code, which is cool and I'm interested to check that out.
I think what really needs to happen is Apple needs to buy Invision and then integrate this tool right into Xcode - then we'd have something to talk about.
Apple buying invision would be awful.
Because it is hard. When you build prototypes you don't need to deal with layout, touch interruption, loading data asynchronously, errors and so on. You design in the ideal world.
And to be honest today toolkits are not really designed for UI that you would like to achieve. Mostly due performance issues because you animate static images, but once you start animating stuff that needs to be recalculated and redrawn each frame it starts to be pretty complicated (and possibly slow).
I think that Framer is actually going to go in the direction that you want. What I think is going to happen over the next year or so with Framer is that they're going to still keep the code portion in place, but add more UI elements in the design tab of the tool that will let users implement interactions. If users want to modify the interactions beyond what's offered in the design tab, they can switch over to the code tab.
Yes, I hope so, too.
Problem is that Framer doesn’t produce production-ready code, which means you spend even more time manipulating pictures of your product, instead of manipulating the product itself. That’s the real problem.
Seriously, how many Sketch clones do we have now?
Symbols != Components. Symbol overrides != States.
Why is the idea of having a hover state or scrollable sections so outlandish?
Check this out, I hope they internalized some of the ideas of this tool. I love Antetype but looks like Ergosign might have lost interest in developing it. Still, worth checking out:
Completely agree. Overrides are a poor man's states. Also, there are a few different components that have predictable logic, such as input fields, so why not build a simple way to toggle between state based on that logic? I think it's crazy that most of the prototyping tools still don't accept text input .
Hey Tom —
What we need is a tool that creates living components.
YES. I 100% agree with your vision of the "next generation" of design tool, and that while impressive and certainly improving designers' lives iteratively, the Figma-InVision arms race doesn't address our most fundamental pain: that "design" pixels and "app" pixels aren't connected. "Export code" isn't good enough, and "developer hand-off" is the PROBLEM, not a feature.
Have you seen Haiku? I'm on the team, and have dedicated the last several years of my life to solving exactly this problem.
Here's an example of a simple interactive component one of my teammates made visually with Haiku, with only a sprinkling of code https://codepen.io/taylorpoe/pen/oGJeba
If you're interested in an invite, I'd be happy to send you one if you sign up for our beta and shoot me an email at zack@haiku.ai
Hi Zach, good to see that people are seeing the same problem. I'll happily give it a try!
Playing with Webflow is like this. I wish it pluggin into backend more and was worked on as a design tool at this lvl. (plus mobile)
Check out Fractal
Found this to be a step towards that - a living pattern library you can set to interpret component-based CSS with a little Gulp config. You can then expose the components via an API.
i'll check it out, thanks!
This is us :)
While with Launchpad you can create a short film, it is a first step towards empowering designers to create a complete fully featured film.
When can we expect the next step towards full feature film?
I think you’re looking for Flinto.
What we need is a tool that creates living components. Just let me create components and let them have multiple states based on click-, hover- and scoll-events. Then, let me build a view consisting of those components.
Flinto does exactly this.
yes, I'm a huge fan of flinto. but i think it's optimized for micro interactions. kind of hard to build a whole system. also, no logic - compontents cannot interact with each other.
again, flinto is awesome. but it's still an artboard/image based tool.
I don't know. What's the solution here, you think? Creating a tool that lets you output fully functional frontend logic without the need to code? If, in theory, that would be possible, it would still be only frontend, without backend. And create a tool that lets you do both? Probably not possible. And even if possible, every design/client/solution probably needs a different technological base (e.g. one use C#, the others use Node.js) so connecting that to the design in a single tool would be probably impossible too.
So this leads us back to the possibility of a tool, that would let us to create fully responsive (real) frontend part of the app/website. But again, it would not be functional: no data would be transferred from the databases, no real login, no nothing. So if you think about it, you would still just have components and theirs states with animations. And this is pretty close to what we have now.
Isn't it?
I wouldn't say we need fully functional frontend logic. Basic interaction would suffice, like we have in most prototyping tools today. But not based on connecting screens, but on single interactive components.
It's hard to describe it with words alone, maybe I'll need to mock it up ;)
I think I got what you mean. But it would probably still need some "states" of the app/website, that would represent different screens, and this will be like artboards in some way, anyway.
Yes, each "view" or page of the site would need an own artboard I guess.
Subform is a tool that's a WIP that address your needs.
Not release yet, but their philosophy addresses your issues:
I actually did get a beta invite the other day. But I didn't see prototyping in there, so that was a turn off.
1000% agree
Tom, http://atomic.io.
Seriously. Get into it. Does what you want.
I totally and completely echo this sentiment, but I think we're back at square one if we need to create custom tools that mimic what it means to just sit down and build the components yourself just because designers won't code. It's completely absurd. HTML, CSS, React, Swift, XCode are all really really well thought out ways of building things, why the fuck should one company or any company for that matter over-invest in creating this made-up fairly-tale simple tool / language which basically mimics the actual way of building and translating design into implementation when the step to actually building it is so incredibly small? Framer is just Coffeescript which is syntactical sugar on top of JavaScript. I hope for the love of god no one attempts to do this because it further helps design to stay away from actual implementation, and I would even go so far to say that it helps dumb-down our roles as designers.
Very good point. I feel the same way, but on the other hand I think that designers need a way to quickly mockup ideas without having to code. You might say that this is what our current tools do, but then again they behave in a way that has very little to do with how the final product works.
When I think about this topic, I always end up googling "learn react". but then I just can't pass the boundaries.
I'm not sure that we can completely close the gap between code and design, because designers are designers and coders are coders, both with very different mindsets.
What I am imagining is a tool (or process), that narrows the gap as far as possible.
I code fine, and I have zero desire to setup an entire project environment with html and css and lord forbid javascript just to prototype very simple interactions.
I agree. I think the future exists out of components. With symbols we're slowly getting there. Think about it. You design something with symbols. And with the click of a button you can export React Components. In reality this is alot more difficult of course. But it sounds good.
Designers should code, but won't
This is very true. I have been experimenting with Bubble.is, where I can focus on programming instead of writing code – there is a big difference. With Bubble, you can actually create a living project that uses real data, repeating components, component styles and pretty advanced logic without writing any code. It's quite impressive and has been fundamental for us to build high fidelity prototypes that communicate our intent to testers and developers.
In fact I believe that despite all the limitations, Bubble (or its evolution) IS the tool we are talking about. It's not advertised as a prototyping tool and it's still not user friendly and flexible enough, but it does allow to program without writing code, and includes conditional logic and database management, something that only Axure can do. But Axure is a prototyping tool, it mimics that only, is mostly limited to front-end, and the code is not production ready. Bubble code is.
Kind of like Framer, but way simpler. Designers should code, but won't.
This is a fun one for me. Because it's kind of true.
More designers than ever are learning programming and are able to solve most of the problems you describe through it. Code is just such a powerful tool.
But a lot more are waiting for some new innovation so they don't have to learn an intimidating new skill and still will be able to do everything you describe. I hope that invention will come – and we will certainly try to build it – but I'm not sure if it will (in time).
So we'll continue to try and innovate here, while we not so secretly try to teach every designer how to code too. That's going quite well, and very fulfilling to see work.
Brilliant! I'm counting on you guys ;)
High5!
Here are a few of the guiding objectives that have driven the maturation of InVision Studio into the full-blown, modern screen design tool we’re announcing today. We wanted to…
We’ve been using Studio internally for some time now and its completely changed the way we work; we can’t wait to get it into your hands! We’ll be hosting a series of live events in New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Berlin, and Amsterdam beginning next week and leading up to launch. We’ll also be post a host of examples and videos so that you can see Studio in action prior to release.
If you have any questions at all feel free to drop them in the comments here and we’ll do our best to answer and bring clarity wherever possible. Looking forward to kicking of this journey together with you all 2018!
Well this looks promising. Looking forward to hearing more details down the road!
Excited to share more Greg appreciate the support!
This made my day :) Looking forward to give it a try!
Thanks Xaris- sooooo pumped to get this into your hands to take for a spin. :)
The world doesn't need scroll jacking anymore. My browser was so sluggish that I just wanted to close the tab and immediately give this feedback.
I was quite impressed with the video for the Studio. More than that product, I was genuinely interested in the ecosystem you guys have made. But the website just turned all my interest off immediately. It just felt like a Dribbble trend painstakingly engineered to give your visitors a bad experience.
More than that, I was genuinely feeling lost. What is part of screenshot/what is part of a website, what are the call to actions and what are those numbers that come in the middle and why are they needed?
I don't want to give your new competitor(Sketch) as an example for how to showcase your product, but I couldn't resist. Looking at their (new) site, I feel I could trust them because somehow the site comes off as transparent and open. Same way how I felt about the product 3 years ago. It's so simple that the design itself doesn't ask for too much attention compared to the product.
I know there are designers/product people/engineers who put heart and soul into this site and product and want to see the best launch, and my only feedback here is that there is still some more time to make the best out of this launch!
Hey Suganth- appreciate the candid feedback here! Today is our announcement only- we'll be launching in January with lots of more updates and expanded site. Opportunity to continue learning and improving! Have a great day! :)
To me, both the video and the website allowed me to understand the story you guys want to tell very clearly. I really enjoyed it. Congratulations to the whole team and I am looking forward to reading you on Medium/Invision blog someday about the struggles and victories you had over the 2 years of development. :)
The product video was wonderful! :)
However, I have to jump in with the other people here - the website was a total let down.
I am running Intel Core i7 6700K, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080, and 16GB of RAM and the experience was anything but smooth on latest Google Chrome on Windows. I can play top of the line games on maximum settings, but a website did not work for me, which is a shame.
If I think about design, then usability is the first thing that comes into mind. The video was flashy enough and I am sure it made most people go: "Whoa!"
The website in this case should showcase the software in a simple yet beautiful way. Stripe comes to mind.
Looking forward to the updates.
Yeah. I just saw a bunch of images flying at me at a very low framerate (am on a 2016 MBP) and no clear element to focus on. The video did a better job to explain the product.
That said, it looks good and am curious about it; but I don't see a real reason to potentially switch from Sketch/Figma. ¯\(ツ)/¯
I am on the same page. I'm on an iMac 2015 and I can't say I had a good experience scrolling the website. Beside the jacked scrolling thing, I was overwhelmed by what info, what images fly, get in-out. Like was mentioned, the video does a great job showcasing the product, but the website, kind of not.
Anyway, super-pumped about this one. I'm waiting for it since the teaser with the animation tool back in 2015-2016. Looking forward to new sneak peeks and why not, beta-testing.
Congrats team @ InVision!
I second this. Love the InVision product and how far you've reached, there's no need for this flashy landing page — just show us the product, you already got our attention.
This kind of communication hurts more than it helps at this point.
+1 I'd have a lot more faith in the performance of the product if the promo page wasn't animating at a couple of frames a second.
Any word on pricing? Is it included with a regular subscription? I would love you forever if it was buy to own. Even if it cost $500usd.
Hey Nathan- will be announcing more on the pricing front in the near future. The high level tease here is that pricing will be related to collaboration-specific features. Delivering a premium product at accessible price points is a big priority. I think you'll be happy when we expound on this closer to launch. :)
This sounds like great news, especially in light of my previous comment. Looking forward to trying it out.
This is exciting.
Any chance that this tool will support Dynamic Buttons? Ability to change the text inside the button and it will automatically resize?
Was just grappling with this yesterday in Sketch - someone needs to solve this! :D
You can do this with symbol overrides. It should be available to you if you have the latest version.
There are plugins in Sketch but yeah, it's more of a hack.
Congrats! Thanks so much for listening to the community and putting all the effort to launch awesome tools.
Somehow this caught me by surprise but can't say I wasn't expecting InVision to take over and hopefully Studio meets our high expectations (:
HYPED
No love for the southeast US? Orlando? Atlanta? Miami? Design companies don't seem realize we have three large art colleges in the area (SCAD, Ringling, Miami International University of Art & Design), and all have illustration / prototyping classwork. And the tech scene is hopping in the Tampa Bay area. We have MalwareBytes, Microsoft, Brave People, etc.
Stephen consider taking a trip to paradise?
I'd love that Brian. :) We had to pick a few cities to start with that have high densities of designers for max exposure/opp. That being said we'll continue to have more events like this (themed more on training and hands-on) post launch as well.
As an a native Arizonan coming from a company that's fully distributed with folks living all over the globe I 100% feel you on this. I wish we could be in EVERY city on this tour. Keep an eye out though we'll be dropping in more Studio-specific events as time rolls on so that we can blanket as many locales as possible.
Hi Stephen, where can we signup/learn more about the live events (im in nyc) ?
Hey Gil- here's a list of them for you: https://www.invisionapp.com/blog/invision-studio-events/
This is just another Sketch clone. It doesn't bring any new value to our workflow. There is a nice good comment in the first post, that is what we need. Not this. Sorry.
This is very exciting!
Would be keen to attend a live event and surprised you listed NY, SF, Seattle, Boston, Berlin, Amsterdam. And not London???
Wondering if because of Brexit?! :)
Ok, seriously, why not inlcude London?
Hey Zsolt- London was on our initial target list (would still like to get it back on there if we can) but a few complicating factors made it difficult. Keep an eye on the main studio site as well as here: https://www.invisionapp.com/blog/invision-studio-events/ We have a good chunk of product team in your area so regardless of whether we can hit it with these events you'll def have more opps to see it / play with it there soon. :)
Hey Stephen, a few quick questions. Support cmd+arrows to resize objects? A setting to only select layers that are entirely within the bounds of the selection rectangle? ESC to unselect everything (Sketch on ESC selects the artboard an this drives me crazy)? Copy and paste styles?
Hey Max - we do have cmd+arrow to resize objects, as well as most of those selection mechanics and copy / paste styles. :)
Nice. Can't wait to see : )
This is beautiful, but honestly more of the same in terms of functionality.
Seems primarily catered to native app design, and doesn't appear to significantly improve on things like typical web interactions such as hover states, REAL responsive design (stacking, not just floating things in corners), or snapping a header to the top of the page as you scroll by it.
I hope I'm wrong, but it seems like all these new design tools are just fancier Sketches without plugins.
We need something more like Webflow, that actually emulates how the web works. Perhaps a design tool with a native vs web mode so it understands the different ways touch and mouse tools work in different contexts.
I've always said that a Sketch + Webflow marriage would be tremendous. I use Webflow sometimes to do quick mockups, and I'll even modify the code output and use it in production. Once they get a little more advanced and add things like pseudo elements/classes, only export the required CSS/JS, and maybe even handle as much of the animations they can in CSS only, it will be a major game changer.
Impressive. As an app designer that uses Sketch daily every week I have a few points that "InVision Studio" has to be better at for me to even consider switching:
Switching my main design tool would be a huge task. I have 2000+ Sketch documents that suddenly won't work with my main tool (if I switched) so it's a major decision. That said, I'm still very interested in this and am excited how this will push the industry forward.
Best of luck!
Test Comment
Yep, Sketch import will be part of this. :)
That's what I was hoping for :)
Woooohooooo !
Figma has Sketch Import so it's possible. It's made switching over to Figma a lot easier and I can use all the assets from SketchResources
I suppose that Sketch import will be included, since the existing tool already has the ability to inspect Sketch files
I think the 'web based' thing 'ala figma' and collaborative design are kinda the same thing....aren't they?.....
No, they mean the technology that's actually running the editor. Figma uses Canvas & Javascript, which I personally have found slow in all instances of Figma, but especially so when using it in the browser. The invision collaboration part can remain in the browser, but it'd be a dealbreaker for me if it went the Figma route and ran using canvas on the web or in a node.js desktop app.
ahhhh..ok dude...understood...
for me, it's a bit different... must be the connection here at the office or at home or whatever, but my experience with Figma is that it's lightning fast. (especially compared to working with super large multiple art board photoshop files...that you can't even share)
to me that's the kicker...
I find that working with Figma is super quick, and when the work is done, it's already shareable etc...can kick the work over to the dev team.... just can't do that with other products.... they'd have to have photoshop/sketch/etc etc and understand how to open files, how to use them etc.... with figma you just share the file and they have everything they need...god how i love that :)
Figma has been fast for me too. But only on high end PCs.
have you tried the desktop app? I know it's just a shell, but it's working pretty great for me :)
Yeah, I've been using the desktop app. It seems faster.
This has been my experience as well. The one time I thought "I am finally seeing the downside of Figma being a web app" I realized it was my entire computer taking a dump because of some other unrelated background process. Figma is always fast for me, The whole web app thing has been a complete non-issue for me.
Hey Darrell, what computer are you on? Any examples of bad performance you can share with us? If yes, could you email us at support@figma.com and mention this comment thread?
Usually people tell us Figma is fast, but there are lots of edge cases to optimize. So if you have a test case you can share with us that is consistently slow, then our team can figure out what's going on and optimize.
We are obsessed with making Figma a buttery smooth experience! Thanks for any help you can provide!
Too bad it's made by InVision.
Why do you think so? I'm quite sure it's the opposite.
InVision's main product has been plagued with bugs that are to this day unaddressed. I am not sure how frequently you used it but I could count on it randomly refreshing my page and saying it couldn't upload my files / load my prototype or save my hotspot because 'something went wrong' every other week or so. You still can't drag and drop a file without all the files you pass over remaining hovered. I see people complaining about how Craft is broken or messes with Sketch. So I am skeptical about what they will do with such a large and complex product.
Couldn't agree more. InVision going down is a regular occurence and it's a pain in the ass. Can't count how many hours I spent trying to fix sync issues and explain to clients that I have no control over these bugs.
I could be wrong but I'll believe it when I see it. I still remember when they announced Motion—their advanced animation tool—back in 2015 saying it was coming soon...
Hey Marc - hit me up at stephen[at]invisionapp.com so I can look up your account here make sure we're dong right by you, really sorry for any inconvenience past downtimes may have caused.
Regarding Motion, Studio is actually what this evolved into.
When we first announced Motion we had a vision for a single-purpose micro-interaction tool that could not only build on top of our existing prototyping framework, but also make composing complex interactions less time-consuming (a chief complaint among the community today). We iterated endlessly and built several internal working versions. However we were never completely satisfied with the implementation and output. And rather than push something out to the community that didn’t measure up to our expectations we took a longer path of moving slower and embracing a new challenge. We began to think about what it’d be like if, instead of adding on top of our existing tools, we completely re-imagined what a screen design tool could be.
In order to accomplish what we had originally set out to do with Motion, we needed to cast our vision larger. And in speaking with thousands of designers expressing similar sentiments, we became utterly convinced that in order to make our workflow better for designers we needed to rethink how a modern screen design should behave in its entirety.
Its a bold move for sure but one we've poured every drop of blood, sweat, and tears we have into. Its on us to deliver on that promise to you now in 2018. Its been a joy to use internally and I think you're going to enjoy it too. I look forward to having you give it a go!
That's constructive
I pay this company when I use their services and I reported every bug I found until I realised it doesn't change anything. I don't owe them any constructive feedback.
Hey Cristian- really sorry to hear you feel this way. I've got three emails for you in our system. Can you ping me at stephen[at]invisionapp.com with which ever one is your main account. Want to do right by you here both with better action on your feedback and with demonstrable love at your account level. We're not perfect, but we do hope to learn from our mistakes and do better by you in the future! Looking forward to syncing with you more directly to ensure we're learning from any past missteps.
How about this: I had an account under my old work email c.moisei@glofox.com from which I reported quite a few bugs and issues I had with the product, I even took the time to provide screenshots / videos and ample explanations. Tell me how many of those bugs have been fixed to date. In fact, I logged in right now to check if there is a list of my support tickets I could provide for reference and was greeted to this:
I am not sure exactly what you are proposing with your comment, but this is not about a bad experience I had, these are issues with the whole product that have gone unfixed for years. If you care to, you could post a story on DN and ask people about all the times they ran into trouble with InVision. There's one such person in this thread alone.
And that is to say nothing about how the product introduced no new features since it was launched and is hardly capable of handling today's needs. I cannot wait to switch to something better and stop paying InVision to make UI kits and post useless blog articles all day.
Jack of all trades. Master of none.
"Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one."
I'd highly doubt that, but I guess we'll have to wait and see. My point is that InVision is trying to be everything for everyone (Trello, Zeplin, Marvel, Pinterest, Sketch) and you can only go so far in focus with such wide lens.
It's not that we're trying to be everything for everyone, more that we're trying to provide solutions for everything digital product design :)
Why not? All these are very closely related. We don’t need pay subscription for 5+ tools just to get a few basic things done.
Microsoft has been controlling the Office space for decades, with the exception of perhaps PowerPoint (which Keynote is far superior) they’ve done a fairly good job at it. Adobe is comes to mind.
In the end, an ecosystem of closely integrated products work better than individual offerings from different companies.
Pablo Stanley is already uploading a tutorial on youtube... (:
Directed by Michael Bay!
This is dope. Also has support for Windows. Nice.
I´m freaking out with the opinions of many user... There are people who say: I don´t like that shit because is not the tool I would like to use. "I want one witch magically transform the pixels I draw in real code", other are complaining about InVision strategy and saying that they are not going to be able to make work so many different functionalities, and so on.
How much hate and how easily you forget how, some years ago, InVision made a tool witch allowed us to make in a very, very easy way rapid prototyping when there was nothing so easy to use in the market.
InVision. You rule. I´ll try Studio and then I´ll decide if is going to be my choice.
People, if you really know how the design tool of the future should be, please stop complaining and criticizing others and just do it!
Should painters build their own easels?
Should drivers build their own cars?
I think you are dismissing valid and constructive feedback that can hardly be construed as "hate".
Yes InVision made something cool a while ago, that doesn't make every decision they make a good one from that point on.
I agree with that. Feedback is always welcome but there are some opinions that are not just feedback.
Imagine when new Tesla was released people started complaining about the car do not fly, because that was what they were waiting for. Then why should buy a Tesla if I have to drive on the same road? That my point. Maybe will be reasons to use Studio even the software was not a new revolution in the way we design and connect vector with code.
I will be happy the day when my designs will be converted in real code by clicking a button but maybe that is not so easy to do wright now. Honestly, I don´t know.
English is not my native language and sometime is difficult for me to find the tone to express myself. It´s nice to chat and share opinions and different points of view.
Wow, the Seattle demo event is at one of the nicest bars in the city. Not bad, InVision.
I'll see you there Josiah- will be boots on the ground for that one. Come find me and say 'hi'. :)
Will do! Looking forward to it.
Hey Stephen, I just got a message that I was wait-listed for the event. :( What're the chances a spot will open up?
Hopefully the keyboard keys for this tool are relatively similar to Sketch.
I know that's probably a bit trivial, but it was the hardest thing for me switching from Photoshop -> kept hitting the "V" / Select key from photoshop and started drawing vectors in Sketch. Took a few months to learn to stop it.
Stephen, any ball-park on when early access is coming? Would love to beta and feedback if you're looking for it.
Aubrey- keyboard shortcuts have been a BIG topic of conversation with the 'v' key being one of the most controversial. I think you're going to like where we ended up with that solution. :)
January 2018 is the earliest at this point for general consumption and usage. We're using it internally today and its been a joy to use. I know its hard to wait (believe me I know!!!) but hang tight- making sure this thing is as dialed in as possible before we release it into your capable hands.
Just let us customize shortcuts for commands and tools (something like Photoshop) and this problem will be solved.
January 2018 can't come soon enough.
Adobe, Sketch, and Figma execs be like...
Adobe is on the brink of an AI revolution with creative tooling yet we’re fussing over drawing squares — https://twitter.com/Adobe/status/920714900401373185 — machine learning and automated processes are the future for both accessibility and creating a computing assistant for design. Not pixel pushing.
What I mean by this is designing at the speed of thought is the ultimate goal no matter what input method we're using.
W R O N G
Why so Liam? Fake news? Did you see the sensei demo today from Max? https://9to5mac.com/2017/10/18/adobe-max-2017-sensei-machine-learning-voice-assistant-facial-recognition/
An intelligent automated solution is the next in innovation. Otherwise we’re still drawing the same squares we have been for the past 20 years.
We've been drawing things in squares for a lot longer than 20 years.
It feels like people here don't realize adobe tools are still incredibly powerful at many things besides prototyping.
But this is the very same shortsighted site that believes that UX design is the only creative field that designs on computers, so I've just honestly stopped bothering.
How much money did Bohemian turn down before you decided to build your own tool? ;p I've honestly been anticipating an InVision / Sketch merger for a while now. Studio is big news.
Seriously though — I'm excited for this. InVision has been an invaluable tool for us when it come to communicating with engineering. The idea that the process will be seamless now is very exciting. And I agree — January can't come soon enough.
Let's do the math. He said 40+ worked on this tool. I'll round it to 50 people. Since it's a complex one I'll say the guys have been paid on average 10k / month. He also said they worked on it for 2 years, so that's 24 months. I'll ignore the other costs but we can safely double the total to cover it.
This means 240k x 50 which is $12M. So probably Invision probably spent around this amount up to date to build the tool. But most of the costs are pending - marketing, maintenance, feature parity with the other tools, bug fixing, etc.
Considering Sketch's maturity and adoption, I wouldn't be surprised if they offered 10 times more - probably 100-200M.
I tell ya, about once a month there is a new prototyping tool coming out.
The strategy adopted by InVision here is pretty interesting from a business perspective: provide a good integration with Sketch, the main used tool in this space, until they were comfortable launching their own version.
Wonder what the dynamics will be for the Sketch relationship now that they're competitive. Also wonder if Sketch might have considered going into the prototyping space!
Doubt it - Sketch know their domain, and they'll push it. Invision are trying to master absolutely everything digital product design as said in the comments here. House of cards effect.
Is anybody else as excited for this as me!?!?! I can't wait.
That feature list looks amazing. very excited to see what I can do. congrats on the announcement!
After Figma I am not going back to installable software. Switching between machines and seeing work available on browser is a huge advantage. I wont even comment on the other advantages of a cloud only service.
Sketch/Adobe/Figma/Framer should be shitting in their pants, but knowing get Invision, it will be riddled with bugs.
Maybe. It still isn't a proven tool. I have to think InVision might have been shitting their pants a little after 2 years of not releasing motion and surviving on what is predominantly a glorified image mapping tool while other tools are integrating the same features and cutting out the need for, what IMO, was an overpriced service to begin with.
That said I am excited to try it. On one hand it's well timed with the Adobe activity. Also gives other tools lead time to release what they have been cooking up.
Went through most of the comments and I'm impressed by a lot of negative people. When did the design community become so whiny...
Only hope your product gets the same reaction at launch, and maybe you would reconsider your attitudes.
Congrats InVision.
I'm not sure I follow your logic there, these companies are not our friends helping us out. These are for profit companies who charge for their products and services and we owe them nothing. If the products they make are sub-par, we should ask for better. If a product you or I or any of the other people with an opinion here are shitty, then we deserve the criticism and if they are good, we deserve the praise. There's no such thing as a good product that is unjustly criticised - if people don't get it or use it in all the wrong ways, then whomever designed it did a piss poor job and the product is not that great. I'd understand if that product was free, someone's attempt to be a nice guy/girl and help out the community. But that is clearly not the case here.
I've seen you focus a lot on criticism... https://www.designernews.co/users/14639/cristian-moisei#tab-comments
Probably we have a different view on time management..
Guess lot of people have been frustrated by Invision, they just didnt have the opportunity vent it out until now.
Where's the midwest love for the demos?!? Minneapolis would be a great addition to that list. Excited to test this out!
Chicago! Indy! Columbus! Grand Rapids!
Hoping for Sketch import.
I'm also a bit worried. Last 2-3 months I've been having more and more troubles with InVision; syncing artboards from Sketch > InVision mainly. I hope they'll work on the performance prior to releasing a software that is great but possibly not smooth (based on current InVision products).
Hey William- yep Sketch import is included. We're laser focused on making this tight, powerful, and easy to pickup. Looking forward to having you kick the tires!
Looking good
Although I can see that it's heavily iterated/inspired by sketch app just like Gravit designer did, is that actually completely legal to do? (just wondering)
If i can import Sketch files maybe im in
Interesting. Very interesting.
damn....
So now we've got Sketch, Framer and Invision + Adobe's XD jumping in this fight too. Only considering Desktop & popular tools.
It looks to me that Sketch will have to add some form of interactive prototyping in the future, as it lacks this compared with the rest of the mentioned tools.
This looks nice and all but feels more of the same.
I would like to see improvements on positioning and behaviours like the folks at Subform are doing https://subformapp.com/
It's interesting there are 190 comments and not a single mention of Axure. It can be pretty easy to create dynamic and conditional UI with, and the fact that it links to datasets is a massive headache reliever.
The problem with it is that it's pretty crappy to design in, has ZERO mobile animations, and bad responsive options.
What I really want is Sketch + Figma + Axure in one tool!
UX Pin sort of does that. The animation builder is not as powerful as the one in Axure, but the closest. It's also web-based (Figma has been lying, making everybody believe they've created the very first cloud-based prototyping tool). The problem with UX pin used to be the poor management of components and overrides, and the performance not as good as Figma, but that was some time ago.
Is it built with web technologies like Figma or is it native as Sketch?
Web technology (unfortunately). Hopefully, it will perform well :)
I felt the same way until I tried out Figma, which easily runs as well as Sketch. If InVision puts as much effort into their drawing engine as Figma did, the web tech shouldn't be an issue.
Glad you feel this way, really. I always feel the delays/glitches, which makes my work not efficient :( I can forgive slack/abstract etc. because using them time to time, but for "production" software I use for many hours a day, it is not acceptable (at least for now. maybe future will be better). I'm really grateful that sketch is still a native app :P
I'm so excited for this!
I love using InVision to communicate with clients and stakeholders, but the workflow from Sketch to InVision always felt clunky. Even the Craft plugin never worked as well as I needed it to.
If this layout tool is anything as good as InVision's other tools, I'll probably be dropping Sketch.
No mistake that they're announcing this right in the middle of Adobe Max. Kind of steals all the thunder away from Adobe.
They're even targeting "Adobe Max" Google searches with InVision Studio ads. Well played.
This looks really promising and I'm excited to check it out. I am surprised they're going with a traditional desktop application instead of a web app like Figma.
I think Figma has proven that the web is finally powerful enough for feature-rich products like this, and it ensures users can access their content from anywhere on any machine. It is nice to see that InVision is committed to building a PC version of Studio though.
Full desktop applications win everytime !
Especially with the “advanced animation” component. (Which Figma doesnt have) They’ll have better access to system resources.
Adobe literally just showed off Sensei (their AI) and how it works with XD here > https://max.adobe.com — (Sensei demo starts around 2:09:00 in the day 1 video) — one click the demo displayed "show me iPhone 8 layouts" from an iPad layout already created and the system output automagically new iPhone layouts + a wired click through prototype.
https://twitter.com/Adobe/status/920714900401373185 — machine learning and automated processes are the future for both accessibility and creating a computing assistant for design. Not pixel pushing.
3:45 in the video seems like just an intro from the CEO?
Edit: looks like the Sensei demo starts around 2:09:00
Thanks! They changed the time stamp after the event
It certainly looks amazing. The trade-off is locking you into their ecosystem which maybe doesn't sound that dangerous at the moment but it's going to become even more relevant on the long term.
It makes even more sense now: https://blog.prototypr.io/why-sketch-will-buy-figma-454d76137771 @Stephen: If you succeed to really deliver what your video is showing, I can tell you man, you will crush the game.
I'll wait and see how "advanced" these animations are considering InVision now is so basic it can't even do what I need it to do on a daily basis. Until then I'll be over here in Sketch and Framer.
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaa
A couple of questions:
Extensibility is a big deal and a core component as it relates to Studio with much more to come on that front.
Prototyping is available for all document types not just mobile. :)
100%. I use so many Sketch plugins that I would have a hard time using anything else unless I could replicate the same functionality.
Which plugins ?
Here's a few that I use. Some not very often, but it's nice to have the option to use if I'm quickly mocking something up. Might not need so many if a tool can build the additional functionality, but Im pretty used to having these handy.
Would I be asking too much for support for ChromeOS as well? I need a really good excuse to get the Pixelbook.
Just filed 'ChromeOS Support' under our 'papa needs a new pixelbook' feature request column. ;)
Game changer
Would be good to know if PSD/Sketch files can be uploaded and converted into InVision Studio projects and whether or not these can later be exported back to those formats for a local copy later
Think they would have said if it did seen as its months of dev work to do that
Sketch import is available.
Yeah but it's not very good yet. Lots of incompatibilities.
Where does it run? Locally or by cloud? And yes, please fix your site. Not everybody got this hell of a machine like your developers ;-)
running 8 fps on 2017 macbook pro.. It would be nice to test it on safari as well :)
2017 macbook pro
This isn't exactly a powerful machine by todays standards.
cool cannot wait to see what you have been working on.
One question: Where / or how will be a design system shared?
Hey Timo- we have a followup announcement planned for design system details later on. This is a much bigger topic than could be covered in todays announcement. We plan on giving this its own separate thread of discussion, love, and exposure in not too long. Stay tuned!
Stephen, is this essentially Macaw V2.0 then?
Hey James- to think of this as Macaw v2.0 probably isn't the most accurate description since intents and key values (web design tool vs screen design tool) are slightly different between the two. That said in many ways I suppose one could consider this the 'spiritual successor' given that the same team (plus many others) is behind it and the tools do share several key 'DNA' pieces. Hope that helps. :)
Yeah, agreed, all I could think of at the time was V2.0. Spiritual successor is a much better term for it ;)
How come you all know so much when its not even been released yet?
G'day Invision Crew, I didn't know how to turn a bloody computer on, let alone create something with one, until I had a stroke and was robbed of a lot of physical movement. The options, that this type of tool makes available, are mind-blowing. I can't just sit watching daytime T.V. So', I'm very much looking forward, to attempting to drive this baby. Keep grinnin'. Sarge
Are files saved locally or only online? One thing I really like about the Sketch+Abstract combo is that you can work even if you don't have (quick) internet or if the server is down.
Hey Maiken- files are saved locally and you can use Studio without any internet connection at all, as its natively installed. :)
I love this local files + cloud approach. Sweet spot.
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