design

Apple initially added a new flashlight UI in iOS 18’s third developer beta, and with iOS 18 now available in public beta, you can try one of the most underrated…

With the latest iOS 18 developer beta, Apple makes flashlight UI more fun

When you think about collaborative design tools, chances are you immediately start thinking about Figma, the popular design tool that Adobe wants to acquire for $20 billion (by the way,…

Rayon is a collaborative design tool for architects and designers

Large companies often have to produce marketing campaigns with thousands of pieces of individual content, including email and social media ads. This means creative teams have to execute ideas rapidly…

Rocketium scales and analyzes massive marketing campaigns

Before founding dipp, Jennifer Chen and Mikhail Abramov spent 15 years working as art directors in New York City. During that time, Chen says they realized that the marketing, sales…

Dipp uses AI to fix bottlenecks between marketing and design teams

Canva has been around since 2013, and has been a tremendously successful design platform, raising over $570 million and garnering 135 million users along the way. With that kind of…

Canva introduces new developer tools and $50M investment fund

A clutch of startups is trying to topple Adobe’s dominance in three-dimensional modeling and do more than Canva. A freshly funded player is PixCap, which is entering the fray with a…

Singapore’s PixCap draws $2.8M to power web-based 3D design

Open source projects continue to stand out as compelling alternatives to proprietary software for those who are looking for more flexibility or price leverage in the tools that they use…

Penpot, the open source platform for designers and their coders, draws up $12M as users jump to 250K

Despite Canva being worth in the region of $26 billion, it appears startups feel there is still plenty to be mined from this “easy-to-use design platform” arena. Admittedly, Professional Adobe…

This startup hopes to take on Canva, raising an $11.6M Series A for its design platform

In a heartwarming callback to the absurdly low-stakes controversies of the Obama era, the State Department is making extremely small waves by officially retiring the old workhorse Times New Roman…

Font furore as State Department retires Times New Roman for retired Calibri

Wikipedia, one of the world’s top 10 most visited websites, and a resource used by billions every month, is getting its first makeover on the desktop in over a decade.…

Wikipedia gets its first makeover in over a decade… and it’s fairly subtle

Software engineers have a host of tooling to organize their projects, chief being Git software like GitLab or GitHub, but hardware engineers today lack that same organizing principle. They are…

Flow Engineering wants to modernize the hardware engineering design process

Apple has finally launched a redesigned iCloud website with apps appearing as widget-styled tiles instead of icons. People might be used to accessing iCloud through native apps on their iPhones,…

Apple’s iCloud website gets a widget-styled redesign

As companies increasingly turn to tools like Figma to design their software, moving the design elements like color schemes from the design tool to your code base can be a…

Supernova wants to make it easy to move design elements to code bases

Apple announced its so-called Figma Whiteboard competitor called Freeform at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in June. The company hasn’t rolled out the idea board app to everyone yet, but…

Apple’s Freeform aims to be a collaborative whiteboard for everyone

Adobe’s intention to acquire Figma for $20 billion, announced mid-September, sent shockwaves through the design industry, and not all of them positive. On a business level, it’s a no-brainer that…

Penpot inks $8M as signups for its open source spin on Figma jump 5600% after Adobe’s $20B acquisition move

For now, it seems as though designers will stick with Figma for lack of a reasonable alternative, which is something that Adobe and Figma can build on.

Designers underwhelmed by Adobe-Figma deal

The popular Mac application Pixelmator Pro today rolled out its latest release with the launch of Pixelmator Pro 3.0. The image editing app’s update included 200 new design templates, customizable…

Pixelmator Pro 3.0 arrives, adding new features, 200 templates, mockups and more

The first rule of the $20 Billion Acquisition Club: Don’t mess up a good thing.

Adobe makes $20B bet on a collaborative future with Figma acquisition

Stark is a startup that wants to help designers make software and websites more accessible for people with disabilities, and they’ve created a set of tools that plug into popular…

Stark wants to make it easier to design accessible websites and software

Pinterest may be best known for shopping inspiration and design ideas, but the company’s newest product wants to inspire its users to tap into their own creativity. The company has…

Pinterest debuts a new app, Shuffles, for collage-making and moodboards

In late June, Modsy, on online interior design services startup, abruptly ceased offering design services, laid off its designers and left customers with unfinished renovations and project orders in process.…

Modsy quietly shut down while some customers were still awaiting refunds

Join, a decision-making platform for architecture, engineering and construction, today closed a $16 million Series A round led by SignalFire with participation from Ironspring Ventures, Metaprop, Building Ventures and Standard…

Join secures new cash to build a ‘decision-making’ platform for construction

Showcasing its investments in AI, Microsoft today announced Power Apps Express Design, a new feature in the company’s no-code/low-code Power Apps service that can convert an uploaded PDF, PowerPoint, Figma…

Microsoft’s new Power Apps feature turns sketches into apps

A digital interior design startup that’s been offering online services is bringing its interior design expertise into the real world. Havenly, a Denver, Colorado-based company founded in 2014, is today…

Interior design startup Havenly introduces IRL services

Lottie animations are everywhere. The JSON-based file format, first introduced as an open source library by Airbnb engineers, can now be seen in the top 500 iOS and Android apps,…

LottieFiles raises $37M Series B to make the animation format even more ubiquitous

Thanks to the explosion of low- and no-code development tools, building web apps from scratch has become easier — and cheaper — than it once was. But sophisticated search and…

CommandBar lands $19M to inject in-app searches with smarts

Platforms like Figma have changed the game when it comes to how creatives and other stakeholders in the production and product team conceive and iterate around two-dimensional designs. Now, a…

Gravity Sketch draws $33M for a platform to design, collaborate on and produce 3D objects

On this week’s episode of Found, the podcast where we hear the stories behind the startups, we talk to Dylan Field the co-founder and CEO…

Figma CEO on Found talks about mentorship and how his leadership style has evolved in the past 10 years

PassiveLogic, a startup developing a platform to autonomously control building systems, today announced that it raised $15 million from Brookfield Growth, the investment arm of asset management firm Brookfield. CEO…

PassiveLogic, which creates digital twins of building systems, raises $15M

Hundreds of companies presented at Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 Demo Day event, and I looked at pretty much all their logos. There’s a lot of solid ones, a few clunkers…

The best logos of YC’s Winter ’22 cohort