Designtuitive.com
What's the one piece of design software you should learn in 2025?
You might expect me to say InDesign, or one of the other Adobe products that I teach – but no. As essential as those tools are, the design landscape is shifting fast – and I want you to be able to take advantage of it.
You’ll be as aware as I am how AI is starting to influence our lives. More than ever, we need to figure out how to stay relevant in the workforce. I’m not in a better place than anyone else to suggest how much everyday design work will ultimately be affected by AI, but what I can do is point you to a fascinating development in design technology which shows all the signs of being huge.
Some context
I started off in print design, in the mid 1990’s. A few years later as the internet started to show signs of becoming what it is now, print was declared dead. So, I thought, as a freelance graphic designer, I need to retrain fast. Alongside my print work I started learning the web design skills I thought would keep me employable for years to come. But having learned how to construct beautiful looking pages and posters, early websites seemed hugely restricted. In my experience, an awful lot of time went into writing dull code that produced very dull websites. To give you a sense of what I’m talking about, this is Apple’s 1998 website:
If that's all that Apple could come up with, what chance did the rest of us have?
But then, out of nowhere, in the year 2000, came this futuristic website from 2Advanced Studios [See Youtube video for full experience– contains sound]:
Not only did this actually look designed, but it had animation, sound… and, incredibly, interactivity. All of this was achieved by an incredible piece of software called Flash. It used lightweight vector graphics to create websites that were futuristic in design and functionality. Like many other designers of that era, there was reason for me to get excited again. If print was dead that was sad, but… look what we can do now.
Back to the future
As you know, print didn’t die, but what happened to Flash? In short, it was bought by Adobe, who started to fold its technology into their other software. It was looking like their ownership of both the flash format and pdf files made their dominance into everything design was sewn up. However…
Apple killed it off. When the arrival of iPhones started to change the way we do everything, Apple didn’t like the idea of Flash websites eating up their limited battery life – so they didn’t support it. So that was that. Leaving Flash experts like me with nowhere to go. Like a lot of others, I got into After Effects, having acquired a taste for animating the vector graphics I could create in Illustrator.
After Effects and interactivity
Don’t get me wrong, you can create stunning animations with After Effects. If you’re looking for a whole creative universe to get lost in, look no further. But as incredible as After Effects is, it has a problem. It doesn’t make interactive animations. That’s not just an issue for Flash-nostalgic designers like me, but for UI and UX designers who are looking to make cutting-edge apps. A few years ago a new file format called Lottie started to enable that interactivity to happen from After Effects. But the issue, again, was large files.
Enter Rive
Not so long ago, Duolingo were looking to streamline their animation-rich language learning app, and the developers of as-then-beta-software Rive found them a solution. The Rive developers have created lightweight vector based animation software… that does interactivity. It’s helped Duolingo, and it’s worked its way into other famous brands you’ll have heard of. Their software is designed to create interactive animations on anything with a screen. Think about how many screens you have in your life, how many interfaces. That’s what Rive is starting to get influence. Just last week (January 2025) Dropbox launched their brand guideline site that uses Rive, and I'm sure they won't be the last.
I don’t often make predictions. I am someone, after all, who passed on buying Apple shares when they worth about a 200th of what they are now. But nonetheless I’m very confident that there are going to be more and more jobs for Rive experts. So if you like vectors, you like animation, and in particular if you like both of those things and have interest in developing apps, the future is looking bright for you.
Personally I’m putting as much time as possible into learning Rive. I suggest you consider doing the same too.
