So excited to have this out there. Fun fact: all the graphics work around this release was completely made in Framer, which is our main drawing tool now too. Now that we have all the fundamentals in place, 2018 will be all about merging code and design. I can't wait.

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.

Framer design is becoming a great standalone design tool except... it's integrated with a full fidelity prototyping tool.

We think that's where design tools are heading, and we're getting closer with each release. Enjoy and let us know what you think.

Haha thanks man. Yours too!

The reason why we built a layout editor in Framer is so that we can exactly do stuff like this. It would be really hard to build on top of Sketch / Figma.

As a fellow tool maker, I'd love to understand what expensive means to you specifically (location, profession, average income) so that we can maybe tweak prices per region. I'm sure both Principle and us would like everyone to be able to afford the tool.

Hey guys, the Sketch importer definitely takes some time getting used to. But there are some difficult problems with making it easier. Mainly; Sketch uses Groups for hierarchy where Framer (and the browser, UIKit, CoreGraphics, etc) use parent/child relationships.

That is one of the reasons why we built the design tab. It's a subset of Sketch features optimized for drawing app ui. If you give it a quick try, you'll see how much easier it is to build interfaces compared to most other tools, and it takes away all of the importing pain.

That always depends on where you’re coming from. If you are not already prototyping: you’re missing out for sure. But if you are, you might want to check out how much more efficient you can be with a tool that combines both design and code, deals with layout and hierarchy automatically, and allows you to express ideas in the highest fidelity possible. Code is simpler than you think and well worth learning, but optional. We'll just slowly pull you into it :-)

The main use case now is to express and share interactive ideas. But asset generation is definitely something we'll be thinking about.

So I think the question here always is efficiency vs idea constraints. On one hand, you don't want to do double work, so when your prototype is done you don't want to rebuild the parts that are already there.

But on the other hand you don't want to be constrained by writing production code that is fast, readable, multiplatform, etc in the idea phase. So for now we're optimizing for the latter. Until that changes.