Building DrawKit #3: Designing the Editor

Bandwidth & bugs

After a missed week due to a pretty solid flu, we’re back!

This was a nicely productive fortnight; I completed the transfer back to Webflow for all assets after the bandwidth debacle discussed in the last post, and in doing so found a bunch of small bugs that needed fixing:

• Search results were slightly broken
• The illustration request form was showing on the frontend, but didn’t do anything when clicked
• View more buttons weren’t view-more-ing

These have all been fixed now, but if you come across more, please do let me know via that little support chat widget in the bottom right of the screen 🙏

Design time

This week I jumped into Figma and started working on the design for the editor. I’m aiming for something that allows for quick, effective edits, without needing to worry about exact details and specifications, at least at first. I’m wanting the UI to progressively get more granular and manual as you need it to, but the initial state should be based around a few clicks to get a fun, beautiful result.

A few years back Vincent Ramsay-Lemelin led an amazing rebrand for DrawKit (check out the full Behance page on the new branding) and I’m leaning into this for the platform side of things. I’m working with Nuxt UI and Untitled UI, adjusting to fit within the branding.

I’m also aiming to be quite opinionated with the design – everything’s starting to look and feel the same UI-wise, with AI generating so many interfaces, and I want this to have character and care.

I won’t reveal the full design just yet, I’m still adjusting things and making sure things feel right, but here are some sections.

You might see elements of photo editors here, some parts of my work on designstripe here, and some entirely new things.

I’m loving the green hue everything has, as well as chunky icons, massive corner roundings, and overall minimal but effective layout. I'm also testing out a new font, changing from the current Inter to Figtree. I think it brings a little more character, and if it works I'll roll it out across the wider existing site.

Next week

This coming week I’ll be aiming to get the editor to a good enough place to start building a bare-bones working version of it to start playing around with. I want to code alongside designing, to make sure things are feeling right as I go, rather than finish all screens entirely before jumping into code.