Prototyping and design

Akira

When Adobe announced it was going to acquire Figma (the go-to tool for designers) for $20 billion, there was initial shock followed by a mad dash to find alternatives, which isn't an easy task. Designers are an exacting bunch. They don't want something that simply helps them explore and iterate over user-interface proposals. If they did, they'd use Inkscape. Instead, they want something that appeals to both their own sense of design and their desire to share and collaborate. They trusted Figma to do this because its drawing tools live right alongside its social features, including comments, notes, and a whiteboard. These all help make designers a central part of the app and web development process. Luckily, there are a few alternatives. The strongest is Penpot, which is an excellent design and prototyping tool that we've looked at previously. Penpot is a brilliant collaborative design tool, but it only works through a web browser and needs to be hosted.

This is where Akira might help. Akira is an open source native Linux design tool in its early development phase. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done – and the project is keen to point out it should not be used in production. But Akira is already functional and well positioned to take advantage of any support and resources that might come from an influx of ex-Figma users. The application will already feel familiar, too, because it's built around a central canvas panel for your designs. These are organized by what Akira calls "Artboards," with a hierarchical layer view on the right and the object parameters view on the left. Vector and text objects are added to Artboards, which can then be edited or moved around the canvas. Subsets of objects can be grouped and ungrouped, and as with other vector editing tools, you can raise and lower individual elements so that some parts are allowed to overlap others. Individual elements can also be dragged.

One nice feature is that a toolbar icon is highlighted only when it can be applied to the current object or selection, so you're not left randomly clicking things to see if they'll work. If an object is at the bottom of the stack, for example, only the raise icons will be available. Another great feature common to other design tools is that an object can have more than one color mixed according to each color fill's opacity. This is great if you're working with a specific palette, but also useful when objects overlap, because their colors will change according to their own opacity levels. Anyone who has used an editor such as Inkscape will understand how all of this comes together to help prototype design ideas, but like Inkscape, Akira is currently missing any collaboration features.

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