Tools We Made as a Design Team

A few years ago we wrote Tools We Use In 2020 to share some of the tools we use to make our work, long before remote work became a global phenomenon. We even made a full blown page called Remote dedicated to the tools we use.

Looking back that was remote work at its infancy. Now with the power of accessible AI, everyone, I mean literally everyone is building tools to help them work better. So today I’m glad to share some of the tools we made as a design team.

Flow for Raycast

We migrated to Aliyun Yunxiao suite a while ago from our self-hosted GitLab server. We use Codeup for version control and Flow for CI/CD, we are pretty happy with it for its seamless integration with Aliyun OSS and CDN. So we built an extension for Raycast to help us monitor builds across projects. You can even check the build logs right from Raycast for quick debugging.

The extension is now available on the Raycast store.

Moodr

Making design decisions is hard. Making design decisions with your clients is even harder. Moodr makes browsing the moodboard fun and easy. Started as a joke, Moodr became a real thing. We imagined a tool where clients could browse moodboards and give feedback, just like they do on dating apps.

Poster

Video production is part of our job. Adding a poster on the website is good for SEO and overall performance. We built this tool that allows you to upload videos and create posters from the first frame. The best part is, everything is done locally in your browser, no files ever leave your computer.

Looper

As I stated the importance of video production, making the video loop seamlessly is a difficult task to tackle. We built this tool to help us check if the video is looping seamlessly. Again, everything is done locally.

Redirector

Redirector is a short link generator, mostly for our social media links. We didn’t want to pay for a third party service, so with the help of AI we built this tool. It utilizes Upstash KV and Vercel to make sure the speed is lightning fast. Also there’s a simple API for our other internal tools to use.

Recap AI

Initially Recap was just a Slack workflow that asks the team questions at the end of the day about what they have achieved, any blockers, and what they will do the next day. It became magical after we connected it to AI, in this case, we used a quite niche model - Perplexity’s Sonar Pro for its speed and cost efficiency. It summarizes the day in a few sentences, and gives often times silly pep talks, which we find amusing.

Hey, thanks for reading this far. Don’t forget to check out our comprehensive Remote page for more tools we use.