I’m incredibly excited for 2014 and wanted to share a few macro and micro trends I’ve noticed bubbling up and being cemented. I’ll also offer a few predictions about what the year ahead might hold for designers.

The year of the prototype

This is the big one: The age of static, lifeless PSD is over. If your designs don’t move, animate, become interactive in some way and tell a story with liveliness, they’re about as impactful as a wet tissue in a boxing match. The past 12 months have introduced amazing tools like

Flinto, Framer.js, Marvel app and Xcode’s storyboards and they are letting us do this easier than we ever thought possible. Additionally they afford a crucial step into our process: Allowing us to use the design we’ve created to test for flow issues, learnability, intuitiveness and overall feel. Best of all it lets us to work exponentially better with developers, PMs and clients because they can touch and feel what we’ve designed. If the the best documentation is working software, a good prototype is next.

The question that rises from this is which one of these tools to use, and my summary is this: Use all of them. Flinto is brilliant in the nascent stages of your apps when you want to export comps from Photoshop and instantly create an animated flow. You’ll be up and running with something in minutes. Xcode’s Storyboards go one better and allow you to add inputs, labels and interactive views, but comes at the cost of speed (views need to be cut, built and coded to a lesser extent). The bonus is that your prototype will not be thrown away, and can be readied for a developer to begin their work. Framer and Quartz Composer will allow you to create interactions of the

highest fidelity but come at the cost of a big learning curve. I use these selectively for focussed, custom interactions that can’t be shown any other way.

If you’re ready to get your hands dirty, Meng To’s series of posts about creating these in Xcode are an excellent introduction to the process.