Top 10 Online Design software

Latest news about Online Design software

2023. Adobe brings Firefly’s generative AI to Photoshop



Photoshop is receiving an infusion of generative AI through the integration of several Firefly-based features. These new additions empower users to expand images beyond their boundaries by incorporating Firefly-generated backgrounds. Additionally, generative AI can now be utilized to seamlessly insert objects into images, while a new generative fill feature enables more precise removal of objects compared to the previous content-aware fill option. Initially, these features will be exclusive to the beta version of Photoshop. Moreover, Adobe is extending some of these capabilities to Firefly beta users on the web. It's worth noting that Firefly users have already generated over 100 million images using the service.


2023. Microsoft launches its AI-powered Designer



Microsoft has launched its AI-driven design tool, Designer, in public preview mode, which comes with an expanded range of features. Similar to Canva, Designer is a web-based application that generates designs for various purposes such as presentations, posters, invitations, digital postcards, graphics, etc., which can be shared on social media or other channels. The tool uses user-generated content and DALL-E 2, an OpenAI text-to-image AI, to generate design ideas. Users can further personalize and customize their designs using drop-downs and text boxes. Designer can now even generate written captions and hashtags relevant to social media posts and provide multiple suggestions for users to choose from. Additionally, it can create animated visuals with AI-powered backgrounds and text transitions. The preview period is free and the app is accessible through the Designer website or the sidebar in Microsoft's Edge browser. Following the general release, Designer will be included in Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions with some features available for non-subscribers.

2023. Adobe Express launches an enterprise tier with generative AI tools



Adobe has introduced the enterprise version of its creative software, Adobe Express, which will be connected with the digital asset management platform, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). Along with this, the enterprise package will provide access to Adobe Firefly, the company's recently introduced AI-powered creative tools. These tools allow businesses of any size to create brand content and social media posts without needing expertise in design. Adobe is essentially offering its own Canva-like software to all enterprise levels. Originally called Creative Cloud Express, Adobe launched the tool in 2021 to replace Adobe Spark and subsequently renamed it to Adobe Express.


2023. PixCap draws $2.8M to power web-based 3D design



Singapore-based PixCap just secured $2.8 million from a seed funding round. The costs of adopting 3D are too prohibitive for most startups. PixCap’s vision is to make the transition to 3D cheaper in the way Canva made 2D designs more accessible. Instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars on hiring a designer for a one-off campaign, marketers can quickly put together a 3D social media graphic on PixCap using its library of templates. With a few clicks, those with no prior 3D knowledge can adjust the lighting and after-effects of objects, rotate them and change the colors to match their brands’ palettes.


2023. Kittl raises €10.8M to take on Canva



Berlin-based startup Kittl has raised €10.8M Series A for its design platform that it claims allows people to “easily turn ideas into graphic products.” Kittl allows users to create professional-grade designs fast and easily by removing the barrier of a tough learning curve. Its features are designed to make complex design processes simple and accessible with a few clicks. Kittl's competitors either focus on basic tools that only allow a small range of creative freedom, or they take a lot of training and practice to get good at. Notably, given that AI is probably going to replace a lot of these tools fairly soon, Kittl plans to double down on existing AI and machine learning efforts.


2022. Penpot inks $8M for its open source Figma alternative



Spanish startup called Penpot — which is taking a new approach to design collaboration through an open source platform that brings designers and developers into the mix simultaneously, has raised $8M. Non dependent on operating systems, Penpot is web based and works with open web standards (SVG). The startup says that it’s been seeing a huge amount of adoption since the Adobe-Figma deal. Even before the Adobe-Figma news hit, Penpot had been making a name for itself. Launched a year ago, the startup has seen tens of thousands of downloads and 15,000 “stars” on GitHub. The 10,000 companies among its active users include Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, Tencent, ByteDance and Mozilla.


2022. Adobe snaps up Figma for $20B



Adobe has announced that it would acquire Figma for $20 billion. Design and prototyping, for individuals and teams, executed in a very streamlined and modern, cloud-based environment, are Figma’s product strengths, and it’s amassed some 4 million users to date. Adobe meanwhile has been building and acquiring a number of businesses in the wider world of digital creation, and that has taken it not just into the larger and more general reaches of design but also marketing and other areas adjacent to design in the longer creation chain. Adobe’s DNA is in design, though, and it has built out iconic products in areas like imaging (such as Photoshop), fonts, illustration, video and 3D and more. The idea now will be to create a seamless connection between these and Figma, essentially building it out as the native platform to bring them all together. Adobe, of course, already had something like this, in the form of AdobeXD.


2022. Canva moves beyond graphic design to launch a visual worksuite



Canva is further establishing itself as more than just a user-friendly graphic design tool. The Australian company has unveiled a suite of new products to round out its products: Canva Docs, Canva Websites, Canva Whiteboards and Data Visualization. Canva will also expand its print offerings and bring its background removing technology to videos. Canva Presentations, launched in 2021, will get a remote control feature, which allows presenters to connect other devices (like a phone) for use as a virtual clicker.


2021. Adobe launches free online photo/video editor Creative Cloud Express



Adobe has launched Creative Cloud Express, a mobile and web app that brings some of the best features of the company’s sprawling Creative Cloud Suite and Acrobat PDF tools into a single application to help users quickly create anything from social media posts to promotional posters and videos. Creative Cloud Express replaces Adobe Spark. Using a template-first approach with built-in access to stock images and other assets, Creative Cloud Express is meant to be far more accessible than the individual Creative Cloud apps. The app will come in both a free version and a paid $9.99/month edition with additional capabilities and a library of more complex templates. Access to the new application will also be included in Adobe’s Creative Cloud All Apps and flagship single-app plans.


2021. Facet raises $13M for its AI-based photo editor



Facet, the content aware image editing software, has raised $13 million. The company has created an AI-powered photo editing tool that can be accessed using APIs. This means that you can do extremely powerful batch photo editing that is kind of like a mash-up between Snapchat’s photo filters, Adobe Lightroom’s batch editing features, Photoshop’s flexibility and the collaborative powers of Figma and the like. And yet, the tool is able to do things that haven’t been seen in the photo editing space so far.


2021. Vector design tool Vectornator raises $20M



Vector-focused platform Vectornator has raised a $20 million funding. Vectornator allows to design sophisticated illustrations, layout mockups, and expressive lettering on the go, whenever you want. With its Auto Trace technology, hours of tracing images by hand are reduced to just the press of a button. It text-editing tool allows to easily handle all your document's text. ‍You can edit masks, drag-and-drop images, create guides and templates, or use custom fonts for your print document. It combines all the vector tools, advanced features, and functions that you need with an intuitive user interface and a high-performance making Vectornator the home for all of your graphic design work. From Branding, Illustrations, Interfaces, websites, typography to anything you can imagine.


2021. Picsart raises $130M for its visual creator tools



Picsart has raised a $130 million round. The company builds mobile and desktop image and video editing tools for consumers and professionals alike, which means that you have likely seen work created by its tools in the wild. And frankly, because they are something that anyone can use — unlike, say, HR-focused APIs or what have you — it’s a startup that feels more tangible than most. Picsart provides both free and paid services. Its paid products include more images for users to work with — watermark removal and the like. The company also offers a teams-focused plan with multi-seat purchase options.


2021. Simplified raises $2.2M to bring automated content creation to marketers



Simplified, a marketing-focused design software looking to take on Canva, has raised $2.2 million in seed funding. Simplified is aimed directly at marketers, who are inevitably responsible for generating an enormous amount of content across a variety of channels. The platform uses machine learning to automate as much of the content creation process as possible, including copy, imagery, format and sizing, and more. For example, a marketer could be looking to post an inspirational quote on social media. They can designate that the content is meant for social media, run a search for inspirational quotes and ask the system to automatically provide an appropriate background. From there, the user can tweak whatever they’d like, like typeface or image cropping, and instantly publish.


2021. Figma introduces a whiteboard tool called FigJam



Online collaborative design service Figma has launched FigJam - a whiteboarding tool. Not only does FigJam give designers a place to come up with ideas together, but it also gives nondesigners a place to participate in the brainstorm. FigJam functionality includes sticky notes, emojis and drawing tools, as well as shapes, pre-built lines and connectors, stamps and cursor chats. As expected, FigJam works with Figma so components or other design objects breathed into life on FigJam can easily be moved into Figma. Figma is also introducing voice chat into all of its products. That means users who are designing alongside one another in Figma or brainstorming in FigJam don’t need to hop into a separate Zoom call or Google Meet, but can just toggle on chat in Figma to use audio.


2020. Skylum launches Luminar AI, its AI photo editor



Skylum made a name for itself with a set of photo-editing apps like Aurora HDR and Luminar. With Luminar AI, it is now launching a brand-new photo editor, starting at $79. The new application, available as a standalone product for Mac and Windows and as a plug-in for Lightroom and Photos for MacOS, was built from the ground up and offers many of the traditional photo-editing features you’re probably familiar with from the likes of Lightroom. The focus, though, is on its new AI-based tools, with a special focus on editing landscapes (and skies in general) and portrait shoots.


2020. InVision refreshes its Design System Manager



InVision, the design service is introducing a brand new Design System Manager, giving teams much more flexibility and control in both creating and maintaining their design system. New features include the ability to import reusable design elements in bulk, as well as the ability to upload native Sketch libraries directly to the InVision DSM, allowing design system owners to create and manage their libraries in Sketch and seamlessly move them into InVision. The new DSM also allows for one-click updating of all libraries when a company is going through a rebrand, allowing for the entire design system to get updated at once rather than a process where each individual design asset has to be deleted and replaced with a new one.


2020. Design platform Figma raises $50 million



Figma, the design platform that lets folks work collaboratively and in the cloud, has today announced the close of a $50 million Series D financing. Figma launched in 2015 after nearly six years of development in stealth. The premise was to create a collaborative, cloud-based design tool that would be the Google Docs of design. Since, Figma has built out the platform to expand access and usability for individual designers, small firms and giant enterprise companies alike. The company also launched an educational platform called Community, which gives designers the ability to share their work and let other users ‘remix’ that design, or simply check out how it was built, layer by layer.


2020. Ceros launches MarkUp, a design collaboration tool for live websites



When designers need to collaborate with other teams, they can currently turn to products like InVision and Zeplin. But Ceros believes there’s a “pretty interesting gap in the market” — once you move beyond prototypes and start working with websites that are either live or in staging, the process starts to become fragmented, relying on screenshots and email/phone/Google Docs. That’s why the company is launching a new product called MarkUp. It allows users to mark areas of interest on a website, leave comments and tasks, then mark revisions as completed. MarkUp is free to everyone and will function separately from the core Ceros Studio platform.


2019. Adobe Photoshop arrives on the iPad



At last Adobe has released Photoshop for the iPad. It costs $9.99 per month for use of just the app, or included as part of an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. This initial version of Photoshop for the iPad isn’t at feature-parity with its desktop editing software. It does, however, support Apple Pencil for iPad Pro and more recent iPad models, and it allows editing of PSD files. There are features like spot healing and clone stamp that can be highly useful for refining edits on the go available right now. A workflow that incorporates Lightroom on iPad can probably serve pros looking to maximize portability decently well, even if it can’t match the sheer range of things you can do on the desktop just yet. Plus, PSDs you store in Creative Cloud will be available to edit right where you left off everywhere.


2019. Graphic Design Software Canva launched enterprise product


Canva, the Australian-based design tool maker, announced that it has raised an additional $10 million to bring its valuation to $3.2 billion. Besides, the company is launching Canva for Enterprise. Thus far, Canva has offered users a lightweight tool set for creating marketing and sales decks, social media materials, and other design products mostly unrelated to product design. The idea here is that, outside of product designers, the rest of the organization is often left behind with regards to keeping brand parity in the materials they use. Canva is available for free for individual users, but the company has addressed the growing need within professional organizations to keep brand parity through Canva Pro, a premium version of the product available for $12.95/month.


2019. Graphic design platform Canva raised $70 million



Canva has raised another $70 million to expand its graphic design platform. The round, which values the company at a massive $2.5 billion, brings its total raised to $166 million. The news comes mere days after the provider of design and publishing tools acquired the free stock image providers Pexels and Pixabay and launched a new subscription service for its premium image marketplace, Photos Unlimited. The new capital, however, will be used to fuel another new product, Canva Enterprise, which is tailored for larger brands and businesses seeking additional brand control and collaboration. Today Canva counts 15 million users in 190 countries.


2019. InVision adds new integrations with Jira


InVision announced even deeper integrations with Jira, letting users embed actual InVision prototypes right within a Jira ticket. The company also announced the Jira app for InVision Studio, letting designers in Studio see interactive Jira tickets in real time. InVision has already had lighter integrations with Atlassian products, including Jira, Confluence and Trello. The partnership makes sense. Atlassian provides a parallel product to InVision, except instead of serving designers, Atlassian serves engineers.


2019. InVision acquired design file versioning startup Trunk



Online design software provider InVision has acquired of Australia-based Trunk, that is focused wholly on file versioning for designers. In the world of engineering, GitHub has provided a way for developers to keep versions organized — developers can track changes, create a separate branch to experiment, and collaborate more easily with other developers by merging branches. But the same courtesy hasn’t properly been extended to designers, who usually spend plenty of time scrolling through long email chains searching for the latest version of the attachment. The Trunk team will be focusing their energy on Studio, InVision’s design tool, which launched about a year ago. The launch of Studio was the first time that InVision truly showed its hand, revealing efforts to go well beyond a simple collaboration tool and become the Salesforce of the design world.


2019. Online design tool Figma gets new enterprise collaboration features



Figma, the design and prototyping tool that aims to offer a web-based alternative to similar tools from the likes of Adobe, is launching a few new features today that will make the service easier to use to collaborate across teams in large organizations. Figma Organization, as the company calls this new feature set, is the company’s first enterprise-grade service that features the kind of controls and security tools that large companies expect. For designers, one of the most important new features here is probably organization-wide design systems. Figma already had tools to create design systems, of course, but this enterprise version now makes it easier for teams to share libraries and fonts with each other to ensure that the same styles are applied to products and services across a company.


2018. Prototyping tool InVision is valued at $1.9 billion



InVision, the startup looking to be the Salesforce of design, has officially achieved unicorn status with the close of a $115 million Series F round, bringing the company’s total funding to $350 million. This deal values InVision at $1.9 billion. InVision started out back in 2011 as a simple prototyping tool. It let designers build out their experience without asking the engineering team to actually build it, to then send to the engineering and product and marketing and executive teams for collaboration and/or approval. Over the years, the company has stretched its efforts both up and downstream in the process, building out a full collaboration suite called InVision Cloud (so that every member of the organization can be involved in the design process), Studio, a design platform meant to take on the likes of Adobe and Sketch, and InVision Design System Manager, where design teams can manage their assets and best practices from one place.


2018. InVision deepens integrations with Atlassian



InVision expanded integration with Atlassian products Confluence, Trello and Jira that allows users see and share InVision prototypes from within those programs. Given the way design and development teams use both product suites, it only makes sense to let these product suites communicate with one another. Specifically, the expanded integration allows designers to share InVision Studio designs and prototypes right within Jira, Trello and Confluence. InVision Studio was unveiled late last year, offering designers an alternative to Sketch and Adobe.


2018. Balsamiq Mockups improves navigation, offline access



Prototyping tool Balsamiq Mockups rolled out a bunch of new features that make it easier to navigate, edit, and export with Moqups. There are two big changes to Pages: Pinned Pages and Page Thumbnails. Pinned pages allow to pin your most active pages to the top of the Pages Panel. Export now has its own button and, with it, a great new option: The ability to export an offline version of the Viewer. The Export to HTML option downloads a fully interactive prototype that can be viewed offline, hosted on more restrictive environments like behind-the-firewall intranet servers. Other improvements include smarter forms, color replacement on page, improved SVG support, image cropping, blur filter.


2018. Design tool InVision gets an app store



InVision, the service that wants to be the operating system for designers, introduced its app store and asset store within InVision Studio. In short, InVision Studio users now have access to some of their most-used apps and services from right within the Studio design tool. Plus, those same users will be able to shop for icons, UX/UI components, typefaces and more from within Studio. While Studio is still in its early days, InVision has compiled a solid list of initial app store partners, including Google, Salesforce, Slack, Getty, Atlassian, and more.


2018. InVision acquired design visibility tool Wake



Online design platform InVision has acquired Wake - design tool focused squarely on supporting design visibility throughout a particular organization. Wake allows companies to share design assets and view work in progress as designers build out their screens, logos, or other designs. Design team leaders, or other higher-ups at the company, can upvote certain design projects or give feedback on specific tweaks. One of the most attractive features of Wake is that sharing on the Wake platform was implicit, rather than on InVision where designers have to take an extra step to upload their prototypes on InVision. Wake will continue to operate independently within InVision, but some of its tools will be integrated into the InVision core product. Moreover, as part of the deal, Wake will be introducing a free tier.


2017. Prototyping tool InVision gets $100 million



InVision, the design collaboration tool, announced the close of a $100 million Series E funding round. The company recently announced InVision Studio, which is meant to take on Photoshop and Sketch, giving designers all the tools they need to not only collaborate with their peers, but create the original designs. InVision also acquired Brand.ai, a tool that helps manage design teams at scale with cloud-based asset management. InVision says that more than 70 percent of its users aren’t on the design team, which is part of what has made the company so successful over the past six years.